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

Abstract

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..