Models of L2 pronunciation learning hypothesize that accurate speech perception promotes accurate speech production. This claim can be evaluated longitudinally by examining the extent to which changes in stop consonant perception predict changes in stop consonant production. Taking a time-sensitive view of the perception-production link, this study used longitudinal data to analyze perception as a time-varying predictor of production accuracy. Mixed-effects models were fit to oddity, delayed word repetition, and picture description tasks to examine how participants’ perception and production changed over time. Oddity task perception data were then decomposed into their between- and within-subjects components and integrated into the delayed repetition and picture description production models. Surprisingly, only the between-subjects predictors reached significance, and the strength of the perception-production link varied across production tasks and target phones. The methods used have implications for future research on the perception-production link.

This study investigated relationships among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of L2 learners of Spanish who completed a prompted response speaking task. Thirty native Spanish listeners from Spain were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk to transcribe and rate extracted utterances, which were also coded for grammatical and phonemic errors, and speaking rate. Descriptively, although most utterances were intelligible, their comprehensibility and accentedness varied substantially. Mixed-effects modeling showed that comprehensibility was significantly associated with intelligibility whereas accentedness was not. Additionally, phonemic and grammatical errors were significant predictors of intelligibility and comprehensibility, but only phonemic errors were significantly related to accentedness. Overall, phonemic errors displayed a stronger negative association with the listener-based dimensions than grammatical errors. These findings suggest that English-speaking learners of Spanish are not as uniformly intelligible and comprehensible as FL instructors might believe and shed light on relationships among speech constructs in an L2 other than English.