High-stakes tasks may prevent language learners from performing successfully due to factors of "communicative stress" (Skehan, 1996, p. 52). Little research, however, has directly examined phonological patterns in learners' performances on low-stakes, medium-stakes, and high-stakes classroom tasks. The current study investigated the oral…

Few prior studies have examined degree of fidelity between raters' assessments of oral performances and objectively observable prosodic indices of accentedness. Prosodic indices of accentedness quantify trait-relevant variance, whereas rater background variables represent trait-irrelevant variance. The present study, therefore, investigated the…

Suprasegmentals have been emphasized in ESL/EFL pedagogy since the advent of communicative language teaching. However, it is still unclear how individual suprasegmental features affect listeners' judgments of non-native speakers' accented speech. The current study began to specify relative weights of individual temporal and prosodic features for…