This study examined whether university students perceive holds (i.e., a listener's temporary cessation of dynamic movement) as a visual cue of nonunderstanding. Conversations between English second language (L2) university students were sampled to extract episodes of other-initiated repair through open clarification requests (e.g.,…

This replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough et al., 2019) that identified holds (i.e., temporary cessation of dynamic movement by the listener) as a reliable visual cue of non-understanding. Conversations between second language (L2) English speakers in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca…

The current study investigated linguistic influences on comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) in second language (L2) learners' extemporaneous speech. Target materials included picture narratives from 40 native French speakers of English from different proficiency levels. The narratives were…

This research report examines the occurrence of listener visual cues during nonunderstanding episodes and investigates raters' sensitivity to those cues. Nonunderstanding episodes (n = 21) and length-matched understanding episodes (n = 21) were taken from a larger dataset of video-recorded conversations between second language (L2) English…

This study explored the attitudes of ethnic Latvian listeners towards Latvian-Russian bilinguals. Fifty-seven ethnic Latvians completed an identity questionnaire to obtain estimates of their ethnic beliefs and rated the speech of eight Latvian-Russian bilinguals for personal traits, judged how well social and ethnic labels apply to bilinguals, and…

This study took a dynamic approach to second language (L2) comprehensibility, examining how listeners construct comprehensibility profiles for L2 Spanish speakers during the listening task and what features enhance or diminish comprehensibility. Listeners were 24 native Spanish speakers who evaluated 2-5 minute audio clips recorded by three…

The current study investigated task effects on listener perception of second language (L2) comprehensibility (ease of understanding). Sixty university-level adult speakers of English from 4 first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese, Romance, Hindi, Farsi), with 15 speakers per group, were recorded performing 2 tasks (IELTS long-turn speaking task…

Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners' perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors' communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales--for example, the Test of English…

We report the results of a 2-year longitudinal comparison of grade 3 and grade 4 English-as-a-second-language learners in an experimental, comprehension-based program and those in a regular (i.e., more typical) language learning program. The goal was to examine the extent to which sustained, long-term comprehension practice in both listening and…

This study investigated how listener experience (extent of previous exposure to non-native speech) and semantic context (degree and type of semantic information available) influence measures of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of non-native (L2) speech. Participants were 24 native English-speaking listeners, half experienced…

Situated in the context of learning second language (L2) pronunciation, this article discusses from information-processing and pedagogical perspectives the role of repetitive practice with L2 input and of explicit focus on its form-related (phonological) properties. First, we report the results of an auditory word-priming experiment with 60 L2…