Measures of working memory capacity and l2 oral fluency

Resumo

A considerable amount of research is now available which addresses the nature of nonnative oral fluency. The research carried out over the past two decades has shown with some consistency that (1)nonnative speech production tends to reproduce first language (L1) speech organization, with a greater number of pauses, greater pause time, increased hesitation phenomena, and decreased speech rate (Deschamps, 1980; Raupach, 1980 cited in Olynyk, Sankoff, and d’Aglejan, 1983, p. 232), (2)nonnative oral fluency is sensitive to context (Riggenbach, 1991) and task structure (Ejzenberg, 1992), (3)nonnative fluent speakers share a great number of fluency features whereas nonnative nonfluent speakers will be nonfluent in idiosyncratic ways. (Riggenbach, 1989; Olynyk, D’Anglejan, & Sakoff, 1990; Ejzenberg, 1992; Freed, 1995), and (4)frequency of hesitation phenomena is related to the production of new utterances and to the level of cognitive difficulty of the task whereas an increase in speech rate is observed when the speaker is being repetitive (Goldman-Eisler, 1968).