Creaky voice and utterance fluency measures in predicting perceived fluency and oral proficiency of spontaneous L2 Finnish

While utterance fluency measures are often studied in rela tion to perceived L2 fluency and proficiency, the effect of creaky voice remains ignored. However, creaky voice is frequent in a number of languages, including Finnish, where it serves as a cue for phrase-boundaries and turn-taking. In this study we inves tigate the roles of creaky voice and utterance fluency measures in predicting fluency and proficiency ratings of spontaneous L2 Finnish (F2) speech. In so doing, 16 expert raters participated in assessing narrative spontaneous speech samples from 160 learn ers of Finnish. The effect of creaky voice and utterance fluency measures on proficiency and fluency ratings was studied using …