Morphosyntactic regularities in retracing phenomena in the speech of second language learners of French

Corpus studies have shown that native speakers’ spontaneous speech contains disfluencies, such as pauses, filled pauses, and various forms of retracing (Candéa 2000, Blanche-Benveniste 2010). Such behaviour is accounted for by the cognitive load required in working memory for the activation of words and the processing of sentences in real time (Levelt 1989). Unsurprisingly, similar phenomena characterize the spontaneous speech of L2 learners, who, depending on their level of proficiency, produce them at significantly higher rates than native speakers (Towell et al. 1996, Temple 2000, Hilton 2014). The following utterance provides an example of disfluent French L2 speech: (1) File: UWI Corpus: 0831_Ex.cha (l.177-183): *STU: et [/-] &hum le gagnant &hum (.) yeah@s &euh peut [//] va &euh (.) faire un &hum (.) cd avec leurs chansons, quelque chose comme ça, &*INV:oui, &euh oui . %mor: conj|et det|le&MASC&SING n|gagnant L2|yeah v:mdl|aller&PRES&3SV v:mdllex|faire-INF det|un&MASC&SING n|cd&MASC prep|avec det:poss|leurs&PL n|chanson-PL&FEM det:gen|quelque n|chose prep|comme pro:dem|ça adv:yn|oui . "and there is a (filler) the winner (filler) yeah (filler) can is-going-to (filler) make a (filler) cd with their songs, or something like that, (listener backchannel), (filler) yes." Research in this domain has usually been linked to the establishment of quantifiable, objective, and reliable temporal measures correlated with the perception of fluency (Lennon 1990, Freed 2000). Tavakoli & Skehan (2005) distinguish three types of fluency: speed fluency, concerned with the rate of speech, breakdown fluency, concerned with silent and filled pauses, and repair fluency, concerned with repairs. Among the latter, Olynyk et al. (1990) establish a distinction between progressive repairs (repeats, but also fillers) that are not necessarily detrimental to fluency as they allow native speakers and highly proficient L2 learners to avoid silent pauses within utterances, and regressive repairs