In
this chapter, the focus is on the cognitive aspects of second language (L2)
fluency, the idea being that the concept of cognitive fluency and the
psychology-oriented framework may present new approaches and understanding of
the surface fluency phenomena (i.e., utterance fluency in Segalowitz’s terms,
2010). To the study of the relationship between fluency and L2 proficiency, the
cognitive fluency framework can, furthermore, offer novel tasks that help to avoid overlap between oral proficiency
and fluency assessment. The different aspects of cognitive fluency are
illustrated, and the concept of disfluency (i.e., inaccuracy in the context of
cognitive fluency) is discussed in the empirical part of this chapter, with
some examples of L2 lexical access in visually-presented tasks by Russian
learners of Finnish as a second language (L2). The relevance of cognitive
fluency and disfluency are briefly discussed in relation to a wider framework
of fluency (cognitive, utterance, and perceived).