On the perception of some Russian hesitation filler words by speakers of other languages

This article continues a series of research works devoted to hesitation pauses filling in Russian spontaneous speech and aimed at creation of a special dictionary of verbal hesitation units. The subject of the research is the hesitation collocation как его (ее, их) (kak ego (ejo, ikh)) that basically appears in difficult speech situations and signifies that the speaker is searching for the right word/phrase to continue the speech. Problems of perception of Russian spontaneous speech by foreign language audience require serious study. Students who understand Russian speech and are good at speaking at university, often get lost in real-life communication. And their communicative failures are often connected not with insufficient vocabulary or lack of knowledge of Russian grammar, but with their inability to understand natural spontaneous speech with its peculiarities. In spontaneous speech there is a fairly large number of units that are not presented in traditional dictionaries and grammars. One of the principal features of spontaneous speech, which is thought over and produced at the same time, is hesitation units of different kind, including whole hesitation structures, in which a speaker's doubts as to what speech means to choose are verbalized. As is shown by the analysis of a speech corpus material, such elements are various and easy to systematize in terms of the functions they perform in spontaneous speech. We will call such units discourse units. Among the discourse units there are non-speech units (э-э, м-м, а-а), conventional speech hesitation fillers (вот, ну, типа) and verbalized hesitation units. In the context of our research an experiment was conducted, in which ten native German speakers and four native English speakers participated. The level of the Russian language proficiency was determined on the basis of data published on the website of the Ministry of education and science of the Russian Federation. Respondents were asked to translate extracts taken from a speech corpus of the Russian language.