This cross-sectional study examines the sociopragmatic use of pitch and fluency features in requests among second language (L2) Chinese learners at two proficiency levels alongside native Chinese speakers. Twenty-eight L2 learners completed a 40-item oral discourse task with two types of request-making situations: (a) a high-imposition request to…

Current L2 utterance fluency literature tends to operationalize disfluency as isolated, individual features. However, disfluency features often co-occur at one location or across multiple locations in one utterance. This study explores the co-occurrence of L2 disfluency features in a speech corpus from 71 L1 and L2 speakers of English across…

This longitudinal study examines the effects of a pre-study abroad (SA) pedagogic intervention and subsequent SA experience on second language (L2) Mandarin fluency. It explores two temporal aspects of oral fluency--planning time and speech rate--along with one performance measure, duration of response. Additionally, L2 contact data were included…