Language proficiency modulates listeners’ selective attention to a talker’s mouth: A conceptual replication of Birulés et al. (2020)

This study presents a conceptual replication of Birulés et al.’s (2020, Experiment 2) investigation of native and nonnative listeners’ selective attention to a talker’s mouth with the goal of better understanding the potentially modulating role of proficiency in listeners’ reliance on audiovisual speech cues. Listeners’ eye gaze was recorded while watching two short videos. Findings from one of the videos replicated results from the original study, showing greater attention to the talker’s mouth among L2 than L1 listeners. In both videos, L2 proficiency modulated attention, with more fixations on the mouth among lower proficiency listeners, an effect predicted but not observed in the original study. Collectively, these laboratory-based findings highlight the role of visual speech cues in L2 listening and present evidence that listeners with more limited proficiency may be especially reliant on such cues. These observations warrant future investigations of the benefits of visual speech cues in instructional and assessment contexts.