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Volume 5 Number 1, Spring 2008, Pages 1-157   


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The Effect of Task Demands of Intentional Reasoning on L2 Speech Performance

    Tomohito Ishikawa


The present study examined effects of task demands on second language speech performance by manipulating the task complexity dimension of intentional reasoning, which was proposed as one of the task complexity features by Robinson (2007a). Twenty-four Japanese college students participated in the study and performed a control task and two intentional reasoning tasks. Six production measures of fluency, complexity and accuracy were employed in order to test whether intentional reasoning would lead to increases in accuracy and complexity at the cost of fluency, as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (e.g., Robinson, 2005, 2007a). The results showed that intentional reasoning produced 1) positive effects on syntactic as well as lexical complexity and accuracy, and 2) a negative effect on fluency (i.e., disfluency).

Keywords: task complexity, the cognition hypothesis, intentional reasoning