Abstract
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.