Pausing as Evidence of L2 Proficiency

Journal of Pragmatics, 2011

International Journal of Bilingualism, 2012

Phonetica, 1996

Four groups of 10 subjects each (English and Spanish monolinguals, and two groups of Spanish/English bilinguals) produced Spanish or English sentences at speaking rates designated ‘normal’, ‘slow’, and ‘fast’. Voice onset time (VOT) was measured in word-initial tokens of /p/ and /t/ found in sentence-initial, -medial, and -final words. The four groups produced comparable changes in sentence duration across the three rates. The speaking rate changes exerted less effect on the VOT in stops spoken by the Spanish than the English monolinguals. Moreover, whereas English monolinguals produced /p, t/ (with shorter VOT at a fast than at a normal rate, many Spanish monolinguals showed a trend in the opposite direction. As expected, all 10 early bilinguals produced English stops with VOT values that were similar to the English monolinguals’. They also showed speaking rate effects on VOT that were similar to those observed for the English monolinguals. The late bilinguals, who had begun learni...

International Journal of Bilingualism, 2013

This article reports an empirical research into the correlation between adult speakers' communication strategic competence and their language proficiency by comparing Chinese-English bilinguals' application of stalling devices in their L1 and L2 spoken discourse. Dörnyei and Kormos' ((1998). Problem-solving mechanisms in L2 communication. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 349-385) taxonomy of communicative strategies is employed as the analytical framework for the present investigation. The qualitative observations reveal that the general categorical variations of stalling strategy in our participants' L1 and L2 discourse are indistinguishable, manifesting the universality of linguistic communicative strategies. Yet, participants are found to be less proficient at utilizing L2 fillers than the L1 equivalents with respect to variation. Such phenomenon should be greatly attributed to language specificity of the lexicalized stalling devices and the paucity of authentic L2 stimuli the participants received. The quantitative results indicate that the frequency of stalling devices increases along with the decrease of the speakers' automaticity of language processing. Specifically, the frequency of L2 stalling strategies is about two times higher than that of its L1 equivalents. The quantitative results further reinforce that L2 processing is less automatic than L1 processing. In brief, both the qualitative and quantitative findings evidence a tight correlation between the speakers' communication strategic competence and their linguistic proficiency. Finally, some insights into the teaching of non-native stalling strategies for language learners are provided.

2015

Phoneticians study acoustic speech signals. But what about the aspects of speech where the signal is silent? The present study investigated speakers' pausing behavior in their native and non-native speech. Pausing measures were applied in order to study between-speaker and within-speaker variability, where within-speaker variability was introduced by recording speakers in their native Zurich German, and in their second languages English and French. Results showed that pausing measures in the form of pause numbers and pause durations are speaker-specific. Furthermore, this speaker-specificity became evident across different languages. Results are discussed in the context of forensic voice comparison.

International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 2019

The present study investigates the use of filled pauses in the Trinity Lan-caster Corpus Sample by 1,244 learners/second-language speakers of English at different proficiency levels (viz. B1-C2) from six different mother-tongue backgrounds, including speech communities in which English is spoken as a Foreign language (Italy, Mexico, Russia and Spain) and two speech communities where English is spoken as a second language (China/Hong Kong, India). Apart from the speakers' country of origin and their proficiency levels , other learning context variables gathered from the learner profiles of the corpus sample are also taken into consideration. The study revealed that, while the number of filled pauses is indeed significantly different across proficiency levels, other learning context variables, such as the country of origin , the age of acquisition or the examiners' experience turn out to have a much stronger effect on the learners'/speakers' use of filled pauses. These findings are discussed with regard to their implications for learner corpus research in general, as well as the relevance of including such performance phenomena in current descriptor scales such as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in particular.

Virtual PSLLT

Speech Communication, 2023

Previous studies investigating the acquisition of L2 stops have found a positive effect of L2 experience, but few have focused on voiced stops, particularly on prevoicing. This study investigates the acquisition of /b/ and /g/ by two populations, English learners of Spanish and Spanish learners of English. Three groups varying in amount of L2 experience (mainly length of residence, but also L2 use and L2 instruction) were investigated for each L1 population. Participants completed a carrier sentence reading task in their L1 and L2. Results showed that amount of L2 experience had a positive effect on L2 stop production, as the least experienced groups were outperformed by the experienced ones. No clear effect of L2 experience was observed on the L1, as learners did not differ from monolingual controls, but some differences between learner groups emerged. Moreover, overall, L2 learners were able to produce L1 and L2 stops differently, which indicates that their L1 and L2 categories were not merged. Still, the L1-English L2-Spanish speakers produced L2 stops more accurately than the L1-Spanish L2-English groups, suggesting that learning to rely on an existing L1 cue may be easier than learning to use a cue associated with a different L1 category.

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2021

Bilinguals' observed perceptual shift across language contexts for shared acoustic properties between their languages supports the idea that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, develop two phonemic representations for the same acoustic property. This phenomenon is known as the double phonemic boundary. This investigation replicated previous findings of bilinguals' double phonemic boundary across a series of go/no-go tasks while controlling for known confounding effects in speech perception (i.e., contrast effects) and differences in resource allocation between bilinguals and monolinguals (i.e., left-hand or right-hand response). Using a range-base language cueing approach, we designed 2 experiments. The first experiment tested whether a voice onset time (VOT) range representative of either Spanish or English phonetic categories can cue bilinguals, but not monolinguals, to use language-specific perceptual routines. The second experiment tested a VOT range with a mixture of Spanish and English phonetic categories to determine whether directing attention to a specific phonetic category can disambiguate the competition of the nonattended category. The results for Experiment 1 showed that bilinguals can rely on the distributional patterns of their native phonetic categories to activate specific language modes. Experiment 2 showed that attention can change the weight given to a native phonetic distinction. However, this process is restricted by the internal phonetic composition of the native language(s).

Brno Studies in English, 2011

The aim of the present paper is to provide comparative analysis regarding the functions of pauses through exploration of the similarities and differences in semantically identical utterances in micro-textual units in colloquial style produced by L1 and L2 speakers of English and German. The research study illustrates inappropriate segmentation of the discourse, inapt distribution and frequency of pause types in L2 subjects' utterances, which may be due to the fact that L2 speakers apply cognitive activities different from L1 speakers. L1 subjects' productions, on the other hand, indicate that they tend to plan and program their utterances in longer blocks.