The intelligibility, comprehensibility and foreign accentedness of native and Polish-accented English sentences were evaluated by six Polish, six Spanish and six English speakers. The nonnative data were also analyzed for segmental and word stress errors. Results indicated that the three measures were partially independent of one another, supporting earlier findings that accented speech can be intelligible and comprehensible. An interlanguage speech intelligibility detriment was observed for Spanish listeners, but no clear evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit was found, as nonnative listeners never outperformed native listeners. The number of segmental errors, rather than lexical stress errors, was found to correlate with comprehensibility and accentedness ratings of nonnative speech, but not with intelligibility scores. In general, the results point to a greater effect of stimulus properties than of listeners’ L1s in the perception of nonnative speech.
To examine whether L1 vowel inventory size could be a contributing factor to the use of temporal cues in L2 vowel perception, this study assessed the perception of English /i-ɪ/ by 66 learners of four different L1s: Danish, Portuguese, Catalan and Russian. The L2 learners performed a forced-choice identification task containing natural and duration-manipulated stimuli. Findings suggest that the participants’ over-reliance on duration cues seem to be partially related to their L1 vowel inventory size. The participants with the greatest L1 vowel inventory (Danish) demonstrated the most native-like vowel perception and the participants with the smallest L1 vowel inventory (Russian) over-relied on duration cues more than the other learners. Interestingly, the participants with somewhat comparable L1 vowel inventories (Portuguese and Catalan) performed similarly.
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