fluency in a second language (l2) involves a quintessentially cognitive processing system that operates quickly and effectively. the perceived importance of researching fluency through a psycholinguistic lens has motivated the related l2 research to resort to current cognitive speaking-specific models. this study, drawing on levelt’s (1999a) psycholinguistic model, probed the deficiency sources...

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech ...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved v...

Fluency in a second language (L2) involves a quintessentially cognitive processing system that operates quickly and effectively. The perceived importance of researching fluency through a psycholinguistic lens has motivated the related L2 research to resort to current cognitive speaking-specific models. This study, drawing on Levelt’s (1999a) psycholinguistic model, probed the deficiency sources...

Task  repetition  is  now  considered  as  an  important  task-based  implementation  variable  which can affect complexity, accuracy, and fluency of L2 speech. However, in order to move towards theorizing  the  role  of  task  repetition  in  second  language  acquisition,  it  is  necessary  that individual variables be taken into account. The present study aimed to investigate the way task r...

Second language (L2) research often involves analyses of acoustic measures of fluency. The studies investigating fluency, however, have been difficult to compare because the measures of fluency that were used differed widely. One of the differences between studies concerns the lower cut-off point for silent pauses, which has been set anywhere between 100 ms and 1000 ms. The goal of this paper i...

The here presented and ongoing study addresses L2 fluency and hesitation phenomena in the context of speech effects in intercultural communication. It investigates the impact of fluency and hesitation phenomena on the perception of non-native speakers by native listeners of German. The first results underline the importance and salience of hesitation phenomena and fluency for speech effects and...

Pause plays important roles for the intelligibility, naturalness and fluency of speech. This paper reported the effect of native (L1) Bengali speakers’ fluency of English on occurrence probability and duration of sentencemedial pauses with respect to three factors: phrase type, phrase length (l), distance (d). In this analysis, 40 nonnative (L2) English (L1 Bengali) speakers’ data was divided i...