Innovation in Language Learning

Listening is a critical skill in communication. However, if listeners perceive the aural input they receive to be too fast, they may experience a breakdown in communication due to comprehension difficulties. In fact, speech rate is argued to play a key role in listening comprehension in both first- (L1) and second language (L2) processing (Bloomfield et. al., 2010). It is unclear, however, whether the speed of delivery empirically affects the listening comprehension of L2 listeners to a different extent than of L1 listeners. Therefore, the present study sought to explore the influence of speech rate (normal vs. fast), listener language (L1 Spanish vs. L2 Spanish), and their statistical interaction as listeners process Spanish sentences articulated by a native Spanish speaker. Data were collected from two groups of participants: 1) native English-speaking college students enrolled in upper-level Spanish courses in the United States and 2) native Spanish speakers of high English proficiency enrolled in a graduate program at the same university. Recordings of 32 sentences in Spanish (controlled for syntactic complexity and length) were played, of which half were articulated at a normal speech rate (about 5 syllables per second) and half were accelerated to a fast rate (about 7 syllables per second). Listeners were instructed to write down in English what they understood for each sentence. A linear mixed-effects model was fit in R that includes the predictor variables speech rate (normal vs. fast), listener language (L1 vs. L2 Spanish), and the interaction term, as well as the response variable listening comprehension (percent comprehension accuracy of content words). This presentation will contribute to our understanding of whether utterance speed is a stronger predictor of comprehension in L2 listening than in L1 listening and it will, importantly, offer pedagogical implications for the L2 classroom in order to improve learners’ listening comprehension.