L1 and L2 fluency in Finnish Sign Language narratives

This study explores the fluency of five native (L1) and nonnative (L2) signers of Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). The aim of the study is to discover the similarities and differences in L1 and L2 signers' signing speed and breakdown frequency in narrative signing. Thus, fluency is approached with a focus on utterance fluency, specifically on speed and breakdown fluency. The two are measured with signs and breakdowns produced per minute. The narrative data was received from the Corpus of Finnish Sign Languages, and from the similar Learner's Corpus. The participants were female and male signers between ages 22 and 32. L1 group members were all early learners of FinSL, and L2 group members people with an education in FinSL interpreting and up to 10 years of signing experience. Annotation cells without glosses, and eight breakdown types (prolong, searching, false start, empty, hold, oscillating, tapping and other) were annotated with ELAN. The results show, that on average, L1 signers produced more signs and broke down less often per minute, than L2 group. The slowest signing L1 participant and the fastest L2 signer were, however, much closer to each other than the averages of L1 groups' 129.3 and L2 groups' 71.4 signs per minute might suggest. The average number of breakdowns per minute showed variation, with L2 participants pausing over three times more often than the members of L1 group did. The relative portion of breakdown types varied as well, with prolonging being the most common in each group. The research on fluency in FinSL and other Sign Languages is still lacking, and this study seeks to address the dearth and establish a novel branch of research on the field.