This study examined whether university students perceive holds (i.e., a listener’s temporary cessation of dynamic movement) as a visual cue of nonunderstanding. Conversations between English second language (L2) university students were sampled to extract episodes of other-initiated repair through open clarification requests (e.g., what?, sorry?). Brief, silent video clips were presented to 60 raters across two experiments who assessed the listener’s comprehension, which was their perception about how well the listener had understood the speaker. Experiment 1 tested whether raters can differentiate between the onset and release of listener holds while Experiment 2 examined whether they are sensitive to the sequential organization of holds. Results indicated that raters clearly differentiated between hold onsets and releases and were sensitive to the temporal position of holds in the entire repair sequence. Taken together, these findings suggest that holds are a reliable signal of nonunderstanding with potential implications for L2 teaching and assessment.

这项研究检查了大学生是否将保持（即听众暂时停止动态运动）视为不理解的视觉提示。对英语第二语言 (L2) 大学生之间的对话进行抽样，以通过公开澄清请求（例如，什么？，抱歉？). 在两个实验中，将简短、无声的视频片段呈现给 60 名评分者，他们评估了听者的理解力，即他们对听者对演讲者的理解程度的看法。实验 1 测试了评分者是否可以区分听众保持的开始和释放，而实验 2 则检查了他们是否对保持的顺序组织敏感。结果表明，评分者清楚地区分保持开始和释放，并且对整个修复序列中保持的时间位置敏感。总而言之，这些发现表明，持有是不理解的可靠信号，对二语教学和评估具有潜在影响。