Why are non-native (L2) utterances longer than native-produced utterances?
James Emil Flege, Anders Højen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
Research has repeatedly shown that utterances produced by non-native speakers are longer than those of native speakers, even when produced as rapidly as possible. The non-native speaking rate effect is known to be greater for late than early L2 learners, but may disappear for late learners when very short-duration L2 utterances are examined. This study examined the duration of English utterances produced by native English (NE) speakers and late native Spanish (NS) learners of English (n=20 each). For normal-rate utterances, durations were significantly longer for the NS than NE group for syntactically complex sentences (e.g., The boy saw that Gary forgot a box of pencils) but not simple sentences (Gary forgot a box of pencils) or noun phrases (a box of pencils). However, the NS-NE difference reached significance for all three utterance types at a fast rate. In Experiment 2, the NS group took longer than the NE group to produce the digit string 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 as rapidly as possible. Taken together, the results suggest that differences in both the articulation of L2 speech sounds and higher-order planning (including the formulation of syntactic representations) contribute to the nonnative speaking rate effect. [Work supported by NIH.]