The impact of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) on comprehensibility and perceived fluency in the case of L2-Greek: a partial replication study

Abstract

The present Master thesis aimed to partially replicate the article by Suzuki and Kormos (2019) on the linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency. The distinguishability among the two constructs as well as their associations to complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) were investigated in the case of L2-Greek picture/descriptive speech. Speech stimuli from 68 Spanish/Catalan L2-Greek learners was presented to 8 naïve native judges to be evaluated with regards to comprehensibility and perceived fluency in a 9-point scale and was objectively analysed in terms of CAF measurements. Correlation analysis showed that most of the CAF variables are more or less correlated with both comprehensibility and perceived fluency and confirmed a strong association among the two constructs. However, judges were stricter when judging fluency than when judging comprehensibility. Furthermore, a series of multiple regression analyses revealed that within-clause pause ratio, grammatical accuracy and lexical complexity are the strongest predictors of comprehensibility, while grammatical accuracy, within-clause pause ratio, lexical complexity and lexical error rate best predict perceived fluency.