Abstract
The present study contributes to the analysis of L2 oral fluency by exploring to what extent the speech rate of L1 is projected into L2, i.e. how the L1 speech rate and its variability affect spontaneous spoken production of the speakers in their L2. The data derive from the learner subcorpus of LINDSEI_CZ (n=31) and a parallel corpus of L1 Czech produced by the same speakers.
Participants were given three different tasks (a monologue, a dialogue, and a story reconstruction) in both L1 and L2, and speech rates were compared using ANOVA. The results revealed a correlation between the L1 and L2 speech rates in all three tasks.
The results thus suggest that there is an affinity between the L1 and advanced L2 speech rates and that they correlate in different types of tasks with various cognitive demands. The results thus suggest that the study of L2 fluency might benefit from taking into account details of L1 fluency