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The oral fluency level of an L2 speaker is often used as a measure in assessing language proficiency. The present study reports on four experiments investigating the contributions of three fluency aspects (pauses, speed and repairs) to perceived fluency. In Experiment 1 untrained raters evaluated the oral fluency of L2 Dutch speakers. Using specific acoustic measures of pause, speed and repair phenomena, linear regression analyses revealed that pause and speed measures best predicted the subjective fluency ratings, and that repair measures contributed only very little. A second research question sought to account for these results by investigating perceptual sensitivity to acoustic pause, speed and repair phenomena, possibly accounting for the results from Experiment 1. In Experiments 2–4 three new groups of untrained raters rated the same L2 speech materials from Experiment 1 on the use of pauses, speed and repairs. A comparison of the results from perceptual sensitivity (Experiments 2–4) with fluency perception (Experiment 1) showed that perceptual sensitivity alone could not account for the contributions of the three aspects to perceived fluency. We conclude that listeners weigh the importance of the perceived aspects of fluency to come to an overall judgment

Speech tempo (articulation rate) varies both between and within speakers. The present study investigates several factors affecting tempo in a corpus of spoken Dutch, consisting of interviews with 160 high-school teachers. Speech tempo was observed for each phrase separately, and analysed by means of multilevel modeling of the speaker's sex, age, country, and dialect region (between speakers) and length, sequential position of phrase, and autocorrelated tempo (within speakers). Results show that speech tempo in this corpus depends mainly on phrase length, due to anticipatory shortening, and on the speaker's country, with different speaking styles in the Netherlands (faster, less varied) and in Flanders (slower, more varied). Additional analyses showed that phrase length itself is shorter in the Netherlands than in Flanders, and decreases with speaker's age. Older speakers tend to vary their phrase length more (within speakers), perhaps due to their accumulated verbal proficiency.

Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with highly regular inter-stress timing. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory) is that listeners attend in particular to speech events at these regular time points. Better timing regularity should improve spoken-word perception. Previous studies have suggested only a weak effect of speech rhythm on spoken-word perception, but the timing of inter-stress intervals was not controlled in these studies. A phoneme monitoring experiment is reported, in which listeners heard lists of disyllabic words in which the timing of the stressed vowels was either regular (with equidistant inter-stress intervals) or irregular. In addition, metrical expectancy was controlled by varying the stress pattern of the target word, as either the same or the opposite of the stress pattern in its preceding words. Resulting reac-tion times show a main effect of timing regularity, but not of metrical expectancy. These results suggest that listeners employ attentional rhythms in spoken-word per-ception, and that regular speech timing improves speech communication.