Disfluencies in the Spontaneous Speech of Various Age Groups: Data from Hungarian

A general ageing of the organism, including hormonal, psychological, and cognitive changes, affects the person’s speech production, too. The slowdown of mental operations and of the speech organs may affect the fluency of speech, but relatively few papers are specifically devoted to disfluencies in old people’s speech, and the various authors disagree concerning frequency data. In the present paper, we examine disfluencies of young and old speakers from the point of view of their frequency and temporal features. The results show that in natural spontaneous narratives, when the task did not involve any particular mental effort, disfluencies occurred in roughly equal numbers with both age groups. In a speech situation made mentally more demanding, we attested such phenomena more frequently in our young subjects’ speech. There are differences between the two age groups both with respect to the types and temporal features of disfluencies.