Abstract
The presented research contributes to the study of spoken learner language with a focus on L2 fluency. It aims to explore to what extent the speech habits in the mother tongue are projected into the learner language, i.e. how the L1 speech rate and its variability affect spontaneous spoken production of these speakers in a foreign language.
This field of study constitutes a research gap, as learner corpora are not very commonly supplemented with recordings of mother language and fluency is usually studied as a concept independent of the learner's L1. The only known comparison is Hincks' study (2008) which examined differences in the speech rate of the same speakers in Swedish and English; however, it was not a study based on a learner corpus.
The methodology is based on the CAF model of language production and proficiency (see Housen et al., 2012; Götz, 2013, or Gráf, 2015). The data derives from the learner corpus LINDSEI_CZ (with recordings of Czech students at C1-C2 levels of English) and its parallel corpus of identical native speakers of Czech. 31 participants were given three different tasks in both L1 and L2: a monologue on a chosen topic, a dialogue with the interviewer, and a story reconstruction based on a set of pictures.
Speech rates were compared using ANOVA. The comparison of the two corpora enabled us to examine the connection between L1 and L2 speech rate.
The results revealed a correlation between the L1 and L2 speech rate in all three tasks. The speech rate in L2 indeed seems to be affected by L1 speech rate and L1 speech habits.
Additionally, the task effects analysis found significantly lower speech rates in the picture-based task, showing that such tasks are cognitively demanding both for learners and natives. Differences between monologic and dialogic tasks were smaller and statistically not significant.
The results thus suggest that there is an affinity between the Czech (L1) and English (L2) speech rate and that the speech rates correlate in different types of tasks with various cognitive demand.