Abstract
The paper presents analysis of the hesitations in adolescents’ narratives. The speech disfluencies in the adolescents differ from those of the adults by frequency of self-corrections and pauses of hesitation. The adolescents rarely turn to repair their narratives but often interrupt the speech flow by pauses while telling a story stimulated by a wordless book. The lack of self-corrections reflects the specific problems with self-control and self-regulation due to immaturity of the executive function. Narrating about a complex multi-propositional event, the adolescents often experienced hesitation that provoked more self-repairs and hesitation pauses compared to the telling the story about a simple event. The description of the relatively simple content was more complicated syntactically than that of the multi-propositional event. Meanwhile, the content complexity significantly influences frequency of the silent hesitation pauses.