Unprepared reading as a type of spontaneous speech (on signs of spontaneity in reading in a non-native language)

The article discusses unprepared reading in a non-native language and shows it to have all the signs of spontaneity that are traditionally considered integral characteristics of any spontaneous speech: hesitation pauses, both physical (ɭ) and filled with non-speech sounds (uh, m-m), word breaks, reading the whole word or part of it by syllables, vocalization of a consonant, and so forth. The material for the analysis included 40 monologues of reading the story by M. Zoshchenko Fantasy Shirt and a non-plot excerpt from V. Korolenko’s story The Blind Musician recorded from 20 Chinese informants. All the monologues are included in the block of Russian interfering speech of the Chinese as part of the monologic speech corpus Balanced Annotated Text Library. As the analysis showed, it is more often that there is not one sign of spontaneity but a whole complex of such signs, and together they fill hesitation pauses, help the speaker to control the quality of speech or correct what was said, etc. In addition, the occurrence of various signs of spontaneity in the course of unprepared reading is closely related to the individual characteristics of the speaker/reader. In general, we have found that there are more signs of spontaneity in the speech of men (3,244 cases; 40.7 %) than in the speech of women (2,049; 27.7 %), in the speech of informants with a lower level of proficiency in Russian B2 (2,993; 37.9 %) than in the speech of informants with a higher level C1 (2,300; 30.8 %), in the speech of extroverts (1,521; 38 %) than in the speech of ambiverts (1,694; 35,2 %) and introverts (2,078; 31,7 %). As to the type of the source text, there turned out to be more signs of spontaneity in monologues of reading a plot text than in monologues of reading a non-plot text (3,031; 40.3 vs 2,283; 31 %). The paper concludes that reading should be recognized as a spontaneous type of speech activity.