The role of pause location in perceived fluency and proficiency in L2 Finnish

Fluency is a commonly used descriptor of second language (L2) speaking skills. Unplanned and too frequent pauses, hesitations, and repetitions disrupt the flow of speech and can cause temporal irregularities at all levels of speech hierarchy, from syllable rate to phrasing. However, most studies that attempt to quantify fluency disregard pause locations. The current study investigates, whether and which pause locations affect the perceived fluency and proficiency in L2 Finnish. Several pause parameters were computed from spontaneous L2 Finnish speech samples. Pause locations were investigated with regards to clauses and phrases as well as incomplete words. The effect of pause locations to h…