While learners desire to acquire so comprehensible pronunciations as to make themselves understood smoothly, acquisition often becomes difficult because, outside of classrooms, it is not rare that learners can hardly find chances to talk in the target language. Even when they talk to native speakers, they may receive only lenient or superficial suggestions from native speakers. How can learners know native speakers' honest perception on their utterances? In this paper, shadowing is introduced not to learners but to native listeners, who are asked to shadow learners' utterances. Since shadowing is as simultaneous repetition as possible, it is expected that native listeners' perceived comprehensibility can be measured objectively as smoothness of natives' shadowings. Experiments show that 1) shadowers' subjective assessment of learners' speech and that of their shadowings are highly correlated and that 2) the former is more correlated with the GOP scores of natives' shadowings than those of learners' speech. These results suggest it is valid to regard comprehensible pronunciation as shadowable pronunciation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.