Second Language Speech Fluency

A fresh, comprehensive perspective on L2 speech fluency, making cutting-edge research and methods approachable and useful in practice.

The only comprehensive survey of research on formulaic language and L2 speech and the teaching implications of the link between them

Winner of the 2011 Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize Exploring fluency from multiple vantage points that together constitute a cognitive science perspective, this book examines research in second language acquisition and bilingualism that points to promising avenues for understanding and promoting second language fluency. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency covers essential topics such as units of analysis for measuring fluency, the relation of second language fluency to general cognitive fluidity, social and motivational contributors to fluency, and neural correlates of fluency. The author provides clear and accessible summaries of foundational empirical work on speech production, automaticity, lexical access, and other issues of relevance to second language acquisition theory. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency is a valuable reference for scholars in SLA, cognitive psychology, and language teaching, and it can also serve as an ideal textbook for advanced courses in these fields.

This volume presents a comprehensive look at the phenomenon of formulaic language (multi-word units believed to be mentally stored and retrieved as single units) and its role in fluent speech production. Focusing on second language speech, the book provides an overview of research into the role of formulaic language in fluency, details a study which provides evidence of that role, and outlines teaching plans and strategies to foster it. This important area has not been examined in such depth and scope before, and this work has many implications for future research and language pedagogy. It will appeal to researchers in discourse analysis and second language acquisition.

The Handbook of Speech Production is the first reference work to provide an overview of this burgeoning area of study. Twenty-four chapters written by an international team of authors examine issues in speech planning, motor control, the physical aspects of speech production, and external factors that impact speech production. Contributions bring together behavioral, clinical, computational, developmental, and neuropsychological perspectives on speech production to create a rich and truly interdisciplinary resource Offers a novel and timely contribution to the literature and showcases a broad spectrum of research in speech production, methodological advances, and modeling Coverage of planning, motor control, articulatory coordination, the speech mechanism, and the effect of language on production processes

This extremely up-to-date book, Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition, is the first volume in the exciting new series, Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition. This new volume provides a thorough overview of the field and proposes a new integrative model of how L2 speech is produced. The study of speech production is its own subfield within cognitive science. One of the aims of this new book, as is true of the series, is to make cognitive science theory accessible to second language acquisition. Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition examines how research on second language and bilingual speech production can be grounded in L1 research conducted in cognitive science and in psycholinguistics. Highlighted is a coherent and straightforward introduction to the bilingual lexicon and its role in spoken language performance. Like the rest of the series, Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition is tutorial in style, intended as a supplementary textbook for undergraduates and graduate students in programs of cognitive science, second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and language pedagogy.

This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive, perceptive, and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings, selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally, language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics, learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.

This interdisciplinary book brings together a selection of theoretical and empirical approaches to second language (L2) fluency. The volume includes chapters approaching fluency from an SLA perspective and integrates perspectives from related fields, such as psycholinguistics, sign language studies and L2 assessment.