On the Hesitation Fillers in Bilinguals Speech: Kurdish-Persian

There have been a number of investigations on the hesitation pauses or fillers in different settings and languages, but there have been only a few regarding these obstacles while being used by bilinguals. This investigation was carried out to discover (a) what types of pauses were in Kurdish language, (b) to find out whether these pauses transfer to Persian language, and (c) to reveal the relationship between participants’ gender, age, and education level with the types of pauses used by them. To achieve this purpose, we recruited 84 participants for doing this research (28 high school students, 28 university students, and 28 teachers). They all were bilinguals of Kurdish and Persian. They all spoke Kurdish language as their mother tongue and were able to speak Persian as the second language. We used both interview and questionnaire for collecting data. The acoustic and descriptive analyses showed that there were silent pauses (silence and silence with gesture) and filled pauses (one-word, multiple-words, repeated words, and non-words (vocalic segments) in Kurdish language. We also concluded that these types of hesitation pauses transferred to Persian by the bilingual participants when they lacked of necessary knowledge. The results of the data revealed that there was a significant difference between bilingual males females in using the types of hesitation fillers, namely, the males used more hesitation pauses than females. We also concluded that there was no significant relationship between bilinguals’ age and the types of hesitation fillers, and also there was no significant relationship between bilinguals’ education level and the types of hesitation fillers they used.