Date of Award

2015-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Speech-Language Pathology

Advisor(s)

Connie Summers

Abstract

Background: Mazes, as they are referred to in the language literature, are disfluencies that do not add meaning to an utterance including filled pauses, whole word revisions, part word revisions, part word repetitions and whole word repetitions. Extensive research has been conducted on mazes in monolingual and bilingual children, yet the research has not been extended to adults' narrative retell production.

Aims: The current study analyzes monolingual English, monolingual Spanish, and bilingual English and Spanish narrative retells to compare the percent of maze use and type of maze use amongst groups.

Methods & Procedures: The narrative retells of thirty-nine bilingual English and Spanish adults were compared to twenty functional monolingual English speakers and twenty-one functional monolingual Spanish speakers. The amount of mazes and types of mazes used during the narrative retells were analyzed for all participants using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts database (Miller & Iglesias, 2010).

Outcomes & Results: The results concluded that bilingual adults had a higher percent of mazing when producing a narrative retell in their nondominant language. The functional monolingual Spanish group used less whole word revisions than the English dominant group during the Spanish retells.

Conclusion: Bilinguals maze more than monolinguals and most notably maze more in their nondominant language. Many possible explanations are discussed in the current study as to why this difference exists.

Key Words: mazes, bilingual, narrative retells, percent mazes, English, Spanish

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

43 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Melissa Silver

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