ABSTRACT
The previous chapter examined cognitive fluency research by looking at performance in areas outside the field of L2 learning. This chapter shifts the focus back to L2 fluency by addressing the third anchor question, Are there elements of cognitive fluency (cognitive fluidity) specific to L2 performance that underlie L2 utterance fluency? In particular, this chapter looks at studies addressing the roles of what are commonly referred to as automatic and attention-based processing and how these may be considered components of cognitive fluency. It also examines the relationship between this cognitive fluency and L2 utterance fluency. The focus here is the cognitive-perceptual processing systems component (the “blueprint” component) of the dynamical systems framework shown in Figure 1.3 in Chapter 1. The goal is to identify elements of cognitive processing that would be expected to underlie utterance fluency and to explore how these elements can be operationalized so that their relation to utterance fluency can be studied directly.
