This study investigated the relationship between experienced SPEAK Test raters' judgments of nonnative pronunciation and actual deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Sixty reading passage speech samples from SPEAK Test tapes of speakers from 11 language groups were rated impressionistically on pronunciation and later analyzed for deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. The deviance found in each area of pronunciation was then correlated with the pronunciation ratings using Pearson correlations and multiple regression. An analysis of the 60 speakers showed that whereas deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure all showed a significant influence on the pronunciation ratings, the prosodic variable proved to have the strongest effect. When separate analyses were done on two language subgroups within the sample, prosody was always found to be significantly related to the global ratings, whereas this was not always true for the other variables investigated.

This study investigated the effect of foreign accent and speaking rate on native speaker comprehension. The speakers for the study were three native speakers of Chinese, with TSE (Test of Spoken English) comprehensibility scores of 180, 200, and 260, and one native speaker of American English. The speakers each read passages at three different speaking rates. The tape‐recorded passages were then presented to native speakers of American English who responded to them by taking a listening comprehension test and rating the speech samples. The results showed that the comprehension scores were significantly higher for the native passages than for the nonnative passages and significantly higher at the regular rate than at the fast rate for all speakers. It was also found that the increase in speaking rate from the regular to the fast rate resulted in a greater decrease in comprehension for the most heavily accented speaker than for the other speakers, indicating that speaking rate is more critical for the comprehension of heavily accented speech. In addition, the results suggested that prosodie deviance may affect comprehension more adversely than does segmentai deviance.

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