Cognitive and Sociopsychological Individual Differences, Experience, and Naturalistic Second Language Speech Learning: A Longitudinal Study

This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage learning Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 5 - 40
Main Authors Sun, Hui, Saito, Kazuya, Dewaele, Jean‐Marc
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2024
Subjects
aptitude
Chinese languages
Coding
Cognition
English as a second language learning
experience
Individual differences
Intelligibility
Longitudinal studies
motivation
personality
Phonemics
Pronunciation
second language speech
Second Languages
Speech
Spontaneous speech
Study abroad
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Summary:This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end of their first 4 months of study abroad. Then, we linked the participants’ gains in comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) to their individual difference and experience profiles. The participants’ gains in comprehensibility were associated mainly with the amount of their interaction with fluent English speakers during immersion and secondarily with certain cognitive (grammatical inferencing) and sociopsychological (extraversion) individual differences. Furthermore, the amount of interactive L2 use mediated the effect of sociopsychological individual differences (extraversion and potentially ideal L2 self). In contrast, gains in accentedness tended to be less subject to experience effects but could be affected by certain pronunciation‐related cognitive individual differences (phonemic coding). A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org
Bibliography:Accessible Summary
The handling editor for this manuscript was Emma Marsden.
https://oasis‐database.org
Language Learning
reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and Editors Emma Marsden and Pavel Trofimovich for their support throughout the review, revision, and production.
CRediT author statement
of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at
The project was funded by a
conceptualization; methodology; funding acquisition; investigation; formal analysis; writing – original draft preparation; writing – review & editing.
conceptualization; methodology; supervision; writing – review & editing.
Kazuya Saito
dissertation grant. The results reported here are based on the first author's doctoral dissertation submitted to Birkbeck, University of London in 2019. We would like to thank anonymous
Hui Sun
Jean‐Marc Dewaele
A one‐page
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SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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content type line 14
ISSN:0023-8333
1467-9922
DOI:10.1111/lang.12561