A comparative study of the abilities of native and nonnative speakers of American English to use discourse markers and conversational hedges as elements of the structure of unplanned spoken American English interactions in three subcorpora of the Michigan

The problem. The purpose of this study was to compare the abilities of native speakers and advanced nonnative speakers to use the discourse markers well, you know, and I mean and the conversational hedges like, kind of and sort of as elements described by linguists to be part of the structure of unplanned spoken discourse in American English.Method. Corpus linguistics was the research method used with three sub-corpora of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. These three subcorpora had in total 9 native speakers and 9 normative speakers of American English, 16 being graduate students at the University of Michigan and 2 professors. A quantitative frequency count was done per participant and per group (native and normative speakers), with a posterior test of significance.Results. Quantitative analysis was followed by qualitative analysis of use. Participating normative speakers were not able to produce discourse markers or conversational hedges in the same was as the participating native speakers, and the nonnative speakers used those elements differently from native speakers.