Prosodic features of second language fluency

Abstract Fluency has often been ignored in speech prosody research, including in research on prosody of a second language (L2). However, a broader view on L2 sentence prosody would be beneficial to the construction of theories concerning the acquisition of L2 prosody and applications such as assessments in teaching, exercises for individual learning, and automatic assessment of spoken performances. The contributions to this special issue give a good demonstration in which directions L2 speech prosody and fluency research should be extended. This concerns the integration of fluency, prosody, and gesture, a more detailed consideration of rhythm measures, and more local and dynamic perspectives on fluency. At the same time, conclusions from the combined contributions indicate other issues for future directions of investigation: thorough considerations of interactional fluency, clear definitions of and distinctions between disfluencies that help versus those that hinder communication, and how and whether human judgements can be used as point of reference in such research. Finally, while (large) between-speaker variations are known and under investigation in L2 fluency and prosody research, similar individual differences are yet to be understood when it concerns L1 speech. We argue for an integration of prosodic aspects of fluency in L2 teaching and assessment, for also taking perceptual perspectives on fluency, and for a new view on between-speaker variation.