Dustin Crowther

Flawed self-assessment: Investigating self- and other-perception of second language speech

This study targeted the relationship between self- and other-assessment of accentedness and comprehensibility in second language (L2) speech, extending prior social and cognitive research documenting weak or non-existing links between peoples self-assessment and objective measures of performance. Results of two experiments (N = 134) revealed mostly inaccurate self-assessment: speakers at the low end of the accentedness and comprehensibility scales overestimated their performance; speakers at the high end of each scale underestimated it. For both accent and comprehensibility, discrepancies in self- versus other-assessment were associated with listener-rated measures of phonological accuracy and temporal fluency but not with listener-rated measures of lexical appropriateness and richness, grammatical accuracy and complexity, or discourse structure. Findings suggest that inaccurate self-assessment is linked to the inherent complexity of L2 perception and production as cognitive skills and point to several ways of helping L2 speakers align or calibrate their self-assessment with their actual performance.

Exploring the potential relationship between eye gaze and English L2 speakers’ responses to recasts

This exploratory study investigated whether joint attention through eye gaze was predictive of second language (L2) speakers’ responses to recasts. L2 English learners (N = 20) carried out communicative tasks with research assistants who provided feedback in response to non-targetlike (non-TL) forms. Their interaction was audio-recorded and their eye gaze behavior was tracked simultaneously using the faceLAB system. Transcripts were coded for characteristics of the feedback episodes (linguistic target, feedback type, intonation, prosody) and types of response (no opportunity, no reformulation, non-TL response, TL response). Eye gaze length for the researcher (when producing the feedback move) and the L2 speaker (when responding to feedback) were obtained in seconds using Captiv software. Following data pruning to reduce the data set to clausal recasts in response to grammatical errors, a logistic regression model revealed that both L2 speaker and mutual eye gaze were predictive of TL responses. Methodological issues for eye-tracking research during L2 interaction are provided, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

LINGUISTIC DIMENSIONS OF L2 ACCENTEDNESS AND COMPREHENSIBILITY VARY ACROSS SPEAKING TASKS

This study critically examined the previously reported partial independence between second language (L2) accentedness (degree to which L2 speech differs from the target variety) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding). In prior work, comprehensibility was linked to multiple linguistic dimensions of L2 speech (phonology, fluency, lexis, grammar) whereas accentedness was narrowly associated with L2 phonology. However, these findings stemmed from a single task (picture narrative), suggesting that task type could affect the particular linguistic measures distinguishing comprehensibility from accentedness. To address this limitation, speech ratings of 10 native listeners assessing 60 speakers of L2 English in three tasks (picture narrative, IELTS, TOEFL) were analyzed, targeting two global ratings (accentedness, comprehensibility) and 10 linguistic measures (segmental and word stress accuracy, intonation, rhythm, speech rate, grammatical accuracy and complexity, lexical richness and complexity, discourse richness). Linguistic distinctions between accentedness and comprehensibility were less pronounced in the cognitively complex task (TOEFL), with overlapping sets of phonology, lexis, and grammar variables contributing to listener ratings of accentedness and comprehensibility. This finding points to multifaceted, task-specific relationships between these two constructs.