Investigating reactivity in L2 listener verbal reports

This study examined L2 listener verbal reports (VRs) for reactivity, in terms of the VR possibly impacting participants’ listening comprehension. The research built on two prior studies. The first was a qualitative investigation, where the study’s three participants had each undertaken VRs using three different VR styles: two mediated (employing researcher question prompts), and one unmediated. In that study the participants perceived there was reactivity in various aspects of the VR. However, the second study, an experimental investigation, utilizing these same three VR styles, found no evidence of reactivity. The current study sought, in part, to address these conflicting findings, while finding out more about potential reactivity in L2 listener VRs. To accomplish this, we gathered data through immediate post-VR interviews with all 14 learners in the experimental group from the aforementioned experimental study, to explore their views on reactivity: (1) for the VRs, in general; (2) on the researcher regularly stopping the text for their report; (3) for mediated VRs, and (4) for the three VR styles. The study found the VRs largely did not appear to be reactive, although participants did perceive reactivity in each area investigated. Based on the results, we provide advice for L2 listener VRs.

Conducting L2 listener verbal reports: Common missteps by novice researchers and ways to address them

Introspective verbal reports have been incorporated into many studies on L2 reading and writing. In contrary, they are less utilised in studies on L2 listening and speaking. The objective of this review is to describe the use of verbal reports in recent studies on L2 speech production. The studies were identified through a comprehensive search across two (2) online databases: the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database and the Language and Speech (LAS) journal database. In particular, the search was restricted to studies published in the past ten (10) years (January 2012 to December 2021). A total of six (6) studies on different aspects of L2 speech production that met the predetermined selection criteria were identified and reviewed. All of the studies are set within the ESL/EFL context. The review resulted in two (2) major findings. Firstly, the verbal reports in recent studies on L2 speech production are all retrospective reports or stimulated recalls. Secondly, the verbal reports mostly played the role of triangulation to confirm and explain the data from other research instruments about the main construct being studied. Moreover, verbal reports revealed the psycholinguistic processes behind L2 learners’ speech including processes associated with bilingual speech production. Based on the review’s results, suggestions related to the use of verbal reports in future studies on L2 speech production were made.

Introspection and verbal reports on cognitive processes—Two approaches to the study of thinking: A response to Howe

The Value of Adding a Verbal Report to Written Handoffs on Early Readmission Following Prolonged Respiratory Failure

L2 comprehension of filled pauses and fillers in unscripted speech

Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice – once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again 2 months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset +40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener et al., 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech.

This study investigated verbal report styles for eliciting strategies data from second language listeners. It examined outcomes from three different mediation (prompting) styles, one style unprompted and the two others prompted, after the learners were first provided with low-prescriptive instructions on how to complete the report. Also, the unprompted style was additionally examined after the provision of more-prescriptive instructions to observe the effect of this greater learner guidance. Theoretically, the core of the study examined two competing cognitive perspectives on verbal reporting. One, from an information processing perspective, is that verbal reports elicit the best insight into individuals’ strategic processes when prompts are kept to a minimum. The other perspective, a constructivist one, advocates the use of prompts in the form of researcher questions, mainly to help guide the report. Seventeen Taiwanese EFL learners participated in the study, with data gathered from each through a verbal report followed by a semi-structured interview. It was found that researcher prompting was both strongly favored by the learners and clearly elicited the best data for second language listener strategies research. The results also indicated that unprompted reports were little more effective when preceded by more-prescriptive instructions.

This study explores the dynamics of lexical activation by comparing the time course of word recognition between assimilated forms (e.g., ca[tp] in cat box) and noncoronal forms (e.g., ca[p] in cap box). Using the Visual World Paradigm, an eye-tracking method, the main goal was to investigate how gradient modification in place assimilation context influences L1 and L2 listeners’ real time word recognition in English. Twenty native Korean learners of English, as well as fourteen native English listeners took part in the listening task integrated into the eye-tracking experiment. The participants were given aural input in the form of instructions (e.g., look at the cat/cap box) and asked to pick the word they had just heard between two options (e.g., cat or cap) on the screen while or after they listened to the input. Their eye movements over the visual screen while listening, along with their keyboard-press responses were recorded for the main analysis. The results showed both English and Korean listeners displayed higher proportions of fixations on the target (e.g., cat) than on the competitor words (e.g., cap) in assimilation contexts (e.g., ca[tp] box), as well as higher proportions of fixations on targets (e.g., cap) than on competitors (e.g., cat) in non-assimilation contexts (e.g., ca[p] box). However, the discrepancy of fixation proportions between targets and competitors was more obvious for the English listeners than for the Korean listeners. In other words, although the L2 listenersin addition to L1 listeners were able to use acoustic variations when identifying the target phonemes, the L1 listeners revealed a higher certainty level than their L2 counterparts. Furthermore, the divergence points between targets and competitors wereshown to appear earlier for the L1 listeners than for the L2 listeners.

Listening comprehension is a real-time process, yet very little is known about the variables affecting real-time second language (L2) listening. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of syntactic complexity and word frequency on L2 listening. Furthermore, the role of the listener’s working memory capacity in listening comprehension was investigated. Fifty-three Dutch learners of French were tested using a working memory task and self-paced listening technique. Working memory scores and reaction times were collected as a measure of processing efficiency. Contrast analyses were run on the reaction times per variable. Correlation tests were run between the working memory scores and reaction times. The results showed that syntactic complexity affects L2 listening comprehension. However, no effect of word frequency on L2 listening and no correlation between working memory capacity and L2 listening in any of the conditions was found. We conclude that linguistic factors shown to affect offline L2 listening are not always generalizable to online L2 listening. We also conclude that working memory considered as a cognitive system separate from other cognitive processes involved in language comprehension does not explain individual differences in real-time L2 listening. Further research needs to be done to better understand (real-time) L2 listening comprehension.

In second language acquisition research, verbal reports such as stimulated recall and think-aloud have been widely used as a window to understand learners’ mental processes. In surveying findings from research on child development, early education, and second language development among children, this chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities when using verbal reports to understand young learners’ second language learning. Special attention is given to age-related challenges with respect to (a) veridicality and reactivity; (b) planning and administering verbal reports; and (c) analyzing and interpreting children’s verbal reposts. In addition to discussing verbal reports as a research tool, this chapter also addresses the use of verbal reports as a potential pedagogical tool to facilitate children’s self-reflection and language learning. The chapter concludes by discussing the potential benefits in future research of incorporating digital technology with and for verbal reports and the importance of taking a child-centered approach when implementing verbal reports as an introspective method.

This chapter discusses individual differences (IDs) with specific reference to second language (L2) listening. It provides an overview of existing research on the role of a range of cognitive, conative, affective, sociocultural, and demographic learner differences for L2 listening comprehension. This literature review confirms associations between IDs such as strategy use or anxiety and L2 listening, and forms the basis for practical implications for the teaching and testing of L2 listening. At the same time, the review demonstrates the relative scarcity of research in this area, as well as the need to ground operationalizations of IDs and of L2 listening in the literature on these constructs. The chapter offers directions for future research, while highlighting the importance of validating IDs and listening assessments for their intended uses and populations in such research.

Training-induced pattern-specific phonetic adjustments by first and second language listeners

Recent studies have found that proficient second language (L2) listeners are able to predict upcoming linguistic information to the same extent as first language (L1) listeners during simple sentence processing, particularly when semantic cues are given and/or few cognitive resources are required for language processing. These findings may suggest that L2 listeners use the same mechanisms as L1 listeners for prediction. Yet, it has not been fully specified under which conditions L2 listeners can use predictive mechanisms. To address this issue, we investigated whether advanced L2 listeners make predictions while processing more complex constructions that are cognitively more taxing. Specifically, we investigated prediction in sentences containing a relative clause that can modify either of two noun phrases. In an eye-tracking study using a visual world paradigm, L2 learners listened to sentences containing a semantically biasing verb or a neutral one (e.g., “I know the friend of the dancer that will open/get the present”). We measured L2 listeners’ prediction by comparing the fixations to target objects (e.g., present among non-openable objects) between the two experimental conditions. Results showed that L2 listeners, similar to L1 listeners, made significantly more anticipatory looks to the targets in the semantically biasing condition than in the neutral condition, though their prediction started a bit (180 ms) later than L1 listeners’ prediction. These findings suggest that L2 speakers can use prediction mechanisms even during complex sentence processing and provide further evidence for the claim that there is no fundamental difference between L1 and L2 speakers, but that cognitive resources matter for prediction.

Although not undisputed, it is generally agreed that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has lexically contrastive vowel nasality, for instance between [si] ‘if; oneself‘ and [sĩ] ‘yes.‘ It is known that second-language (L2) learners of BP struggle with oral-nasal vowel contrasts in perception, but less is known on how L2 learners perform in perception. This paper reports on a study that investigated the perception of BP contrastive vowel nasality by a group of English-native learners of BP and a native speaker control group to assess how non-native listeners perform in pre-lexical discrimination and lexical identification of contrastive vowel nasality. Although results from a vowel discrimination task revealed no differences between L2 and L1 listeners in terms of pre-lexical perception, a lexical identification task revealed that some oral-nasal vowel contrasts impeded lexical access in L2 listeners. These findings highlight how L2 listeners can perform comparably to L1 listeners in perception of non-native sound contrasts (here, vowel nasality) at the pre-lexical level, but may still struggle in encoding those contrasts at a lexical level.