The fluency task, which involves lexical retrieval from a categorical or thematic prompt, has been a crucial paradigm in studies about lexicon in bilingualism and additional languages. Particularly, there has been a very productive cognitive turn towards analytical models based on the exploration of the cognitive processes underlying the mental…

This study explored the effect of speaking task on midclause pausing characteristics in the L1 and L2 speech of the same speakers to gain further insights into the potential relationship between pause location and stages of speech production. Participants included English L1 learners of L2 French (n = 29) or Spanish (n = 27) from the publicly…

Purpose: Bilingual children's speech often contains high percentages of disfluencies in both their languages; however, the distribution of disfluency types and the difference across bilinguals' two languages have received insufficient and inconsistent empirical support. The present research aims to profile "typical" bilingual disfluency…

This study conceptually replicated Huensch and Tracy-Ventura's (2017) analysis of the relationship between L1 and L2 utterance fluency with adult L1-English learners of Spanish. Data from 88 participants were analyzed to explore the proportion of the variance in L2 fluency measures that can be attributed to the corresponding L1 measures, and the…

Current L2 utterance fluency literature tends to operationalize disfluency as isolated, individual features. However, disfluency features often co-occur at one location or across multiple locations in one utterance. This study explores the co-occurrence of L2 disfluency features in a speech corpus from 71 L1 and L2 speakers of English across…

orInverse relations, or "trade-off effects," are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic…

Second language (L2) researchers have long acknowledged the role of language anxiety in communication processes, such that learners with greater language anxiety tend to be less willing to engage in communication. However, little research has explored links between L2 speakers' perceptions of conversation and dynamic measures of anxiety.…

Successful face-to-face communication involves multiple channels, notably hand gestures in addition to speech for spoken language, and mouth patterns in addition to manual signs for sign language. In four experiments, we assess the extent to which comprehenders of British Sign Language (BSL) and English rely, respectively, on cues from the hands…

In the L2 fluency literature there is considerable debate over how best to operationally define pauses and how different pause measures relate to L2 proficiency. This creates a challenge for researchers interested in L2 fluency, and particularly those who are working with groups that vary in L2 proficiency. This article addresses these issues by…

The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

This study examined the linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency in the context of L2 argumentative speech elicited from 40 Japanese-speaking learners of English. Their speaking performance was judged by 10 inexperienced native speakers of English for comprehensibility and perceived fluency, and was also objectively…

This quasi-experimental study reports on the outcomes of a video-synchronous learning program in which an element of project-based foreign language learning was integrated. The project chosen was to cooperatively create a homepage. American students learning Japanese in the United States and Japanese students learning English in Japan made pairs…

The nature of this research study examines the relationship between text-talking and writing skills used by American Sign Language (ASL) and English speakers. When given ample opportunity to text-talk in academic settings, it is likely that students will improve their expressive communication and writing skills. The main research question asks:…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

This study describes a vocabulary size test in Arabic used with 339 native speaking learners at school and university in Saudi Arabia. Native speaker vocabulary size scores should provide targets for attainment for learners of Arabic, should inform the writers of course books and teaching materials, and the test itself should allow learners to…