Abstract This study examines filled pauses and prolongations in Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew by comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers to identify both universal and language-specific disfluency patterns. Data were collected from monologues produced by monolinguals and two bilingual groups: Russian-Hebrew speakers who acquired both languages in early childhood, and Mandarin Chinese-Russian speakers who learned Russian later as a second language (L2). Analyses focused on the frequency and types of disfluencies. Monolinguals showed similar disfluency rates across languages, suggesting some universal patterns. Early bilinguals mirrored monolingual patterns in both languages, likely due to balanced early exposure. In contrast, Mandarin-Russian bilinguals exhibited higher disfluency rates in L2-Russian, likely due to increased cognitive load during speech planning. Additionally, they produced unique filled pause types not found in monolinguals, reflecting cross-linguistic transfer. These findings highlight how factors such as language proficiency, language exposure onset, and typological differences shape disfluency patterns in bilingual speech.
Beradze et al. (Sat,) studied this question.