Posters

The relationship between repair characteristics, breakdown fluency, and perceived fluency of second language speech

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Abstract

Disfluencies are a common feature of spontaneous second language (L2) speech but are often treated as uniformly negative indicators of fluency in speaking assessment. In particular, repair phenomena such as repetitions, false starts, and reformulations are frequently grouped together with breakdown measures (i.e., filled and silent pauses), despite potential functional differences. This study investigates the relationship between repair frequency, breakdown fluency, and perceived fluency in short L2 narrative speech and examines whether repair behaviors contribute to listener judgments beyond temporal breakdown measures. Speech samples from 20 L2 speakers of English were elicited using a picture narration task and rated for perceived fluency by 14 expert listeners. Results from correlational and mixed-effects analyses showed that repair frequency was not a significant predictor of perceived fluency, whereas mean silent-pause duration was strongly and negatively associated with ratings. These findings support a conceptual distinction between repair fluency and breakdown fluency and suggest that self-repair should not be interpreted as evidence of impaired fluency in L2 speaking assessment.

Keywords: perceived fluency, repair fluency, breakdown fluency, self-repair, second language, pronunciation

How to Cite:

Litten, C., Ranjbar, M., Na, I., Prikazchikov, M., & Sonsaat-Hegelheimer, S. (2026). The relationship between repair characteristics, breakdown fluency, and perceived fluency of second language speech. In P. Trofimovich, A. Bodea, T.-N. N. Le, R. Suzuki, & C. Teló (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (pp. 1–11). Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, October 2025. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.22333