Filled pauses as evidence of L2 proficiency: Finnish Australians speaking English

1. Introduction The paper discusses the application of a computational technique to tag a corpus containing Finnish Australian English automatically and to analyze the frequency vectors of part-of-speech (POS) trigrams using a permutation test (Nerbonne & Wiersma 2006). Our general goal is to detect the linguistic sources of the syntactic variation between two groups, the " adults " , who had received their school education in Finland, and the " juveniles " , who were educated in Australia. The idea of the technique is to utilize frequency profiles of trigrams of POS categories as indicators of syntactic distance between the groups and then examine potential effects of shift-induced interference (substratum transfer) on second language acquisition (SLA). Lauttamus, Nerbonne & Wiersma (2007) show that some features we describe as " contaminating " the interlanguage of the adults can be best attributed to Finnish substratum transfer. However, there are other features in our data that may also be ascribed to more " universal " primitives or universal properties of the language faculty (cf. Chambers 2003: 265-266). To explain differential usage by the two groups, we also draw upon the strategies, processes and developmental patterns that second language learners usually evince in their interlanguage regardless of their mother tongue. We are therefore proponents of an approach to language contact where results from SLA research are highly relevant (cf. e.g. Siemund 2008: 4). The focus of the present paper is on the disfluent speech that the adults, rather than the juveniles, produce. We apply the technique described in detail below to examine if the two groups show a differential use of filled pauses ('vocalized pauses'), tagged as interjec(tion) in our data and including items such as um, uh, and ah, which are characteristic of the adults. Lauttamus et al. (2007: 290-291) suggest that features such as filled pauses (FPs), repeats, false starts, and repairs, are (statistically) significant determinants that distinguish less proficient learners having acquired an L2 later in life (the adults) from more proficient learners having acquired their L2 at early age (the juveniles). Difficulties in controlling pause duration and placement seem to be common among all learners irrespective of the target language. Paananen-Porkka (2007) argues that pausing, including FPs, is the main source for the anomalies found in English speech rhythm by Finnish comprehensive school students. She also states that " pauses not only occurred at sentence or clause boundaries, but also …