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Makale Özeti:
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Nowadays we are witnessing a substantial growth
in the number of radio stations, as well as a simultaneous
decline in the quality of the hosts’ speech, particularly its
fluency. Whereas people may be quite tolerant of various
hesitations in everyday conversations, listeners often find
dysfluencies in the speech of radio hosts distracting and
irritating, expecting the hosts to be skilled in controlling their
output.This research paper therefore offers a contrastive
analysis of hesitations in the speech production of English
and Croatian radio hosts, with the aim of determining
whether the frequency of hesitation markers can be related to
the formal training of hosts. If so, we can suppose that
greater fluency of speech may be achieved through
practice.To this purpose we have analyzed eight minutes (480
seconds) of speech of 32 radio hosts, 16 American and 16
Croatian, with an equal number of males and females in each
group. Also, half of the hosts work at public radio stations,
and the other half at commercial ones. In order to obtain the
most objective results possible, the analyzed samples were
taken from different episodes of talk shows on various
subjects, as well as from different parts of the episodes
(beginning, middle and ending). The results indicate that
there is no correlation between gender and fluency since
there was no relevant difference in the frequency of
hesitations produced by male and female hosts, in spite of the
generally accepted popular view that women are more fluent
and verbal than men. More importantly, the results indicate
that fluency is an aspect of speech that can be improved
through practice and formal training. A surprisingly similar
number of hesitations in the speech of American and Croatian
hosts confirms the fact that speech fluency is a
cognitiveaspect of language, independent of language
specific features.
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