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Explaining second language utterance fluency: Contribution of cognitive fluency and first language utterance fluency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2020

Jimin Kahng Open the ORCID record for Jimin Kahng [Opens in a new window]
Jimin Kahng*
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Given that utterance fluency in a second language (L2) is associated with not only L2 cognitive fluency but also utterance fluency in the first language (L1), the study examined to what extent different measures of L2 utterance fluency can be explained by L2-specific cognitive fluency and/or the corresponding L1 utterance fluency measures. Utterance fluency measures on speed, breakdown, and repair phenomena and cognitive fluency measures including speed of lexical retrieval, syntactic encoding, and articulation were collected in the L1 and the L2 from 44 Chinese learners of English. The results show that most L2 utterance fluency measures are accounted for by the combination of L2-specific cognitive fluency measures and the equivalent L1 utterance fluency measure, whereas the number of mid-clause silent pauses and corrections, and mean syllable duration are largely explained by L2-specific cognitive measures, suggesting that they reflect L2-specific knowledge and cognitive skills. In contrast, mean silent pause duration and the number of filled pauses are mainly explained by the corresponding L1 utterance fluency measures.

Keywords

cognitive fluencyL1 fluencyL2 fluency
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , March 2020 , pp. 457 - 480
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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