School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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Second language fluency: re-thinking utterance fluency from a phonetics-phonology interface

Reynolds Cavallieri, I ; Wigglesworth, G ; Maxwell, O ; Calhoun, S ; Escudero, P ; TABAIN, M ; Warren, P (Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., 2019-08-09)

Research into second language fluency has called for cross-linguistic studies to rule out measures that can be attributed to intra-speaker variation. However, cross-linguistic comparisons in fluency studies are problematic. Research in the area has not necessarily taken into consideration differences across languages such as syllable structure, phonotactics, durational cues to prominence and prosodic levels, and idiosyncratic nature of pause duration. The preliminary results of this study into L2 fluency in Chilean Spanish speakers of English revealed that speed and pause phenomena were mostly idiosyncratic, and that segments rather than syllables could be a more reliable measure. Durational cues for phrasal level prominence were not implemented consistently in the L1 and preboundary lengthening in the L2 was not necessarily being used to signal prosodic constituent boundaries. It may be useful to re-operationalize measures used in L2 fluency studies from a phonetics-phonology interface perspective