Dictation as a Measure of Mutual Intelligibility: A Pilot Study

Abstract

An experiment using dictation in foreign and native accents of English suggests that this is a fruitful device for the study of individual and group differences affecting mutual intelligibility. P r i o r listener-experience with the voice of the speaker appears to be a prominent factor in intelligibility, indicating that accommodation to the speaker over time is a crucial variable, and that languaqe teachers are a p t to be the poorest judges of their students' ability to communicate with strangers. A combination of age, education, and ESL teaching experience s e e m s to increase ability to comprehend unfamiliar speakers. Bilingual Spanish-English listeners have a n advantage in decoding Spanish-accented English, while American Indians scored below ESL students in ability to decode a heavy Spanish accent. N e i t h e r clear nor noisecontaminated tapes showed consistent superiority in maximizing discrimination among listener groups.

The Relationship Between Raters' Prior Language Study and the Evaluation of Foreign Language Speech Samples

“…As reported in Munro et al (2006), Flege (1998) Sometimes speech perceived as heavily accented is also perceived as completely comprehensible and intelligible (Brodkey, 1972;Derwing & Munro, 1997;Munro & Derwing, 1995;Smith & Bisazza, 1982;Smith & Rafiqzad, 1979), thus, "listeners often assign good comprehensibility ratings to speech samples that they have also rated as heavily accented" (Derwing & Munro, 2005, p. 386). Results only show that listeners from different L1 backgrounds can equally recognize that accents are there.…”

How Do Raters From India Perform in Scoring the Toefl Ibt™ Speaking Section and What Kind of Training Helps?

“…Some research has shown that familiarity with the speaker's accent facilitates comprehension and may thus lead to more lenient evaluations of the overall speech quality (Brodkey, 1972;Smith & Bisazza, 1982;Smith & Rafiqzad, 1979), whereas other studies have revealed lower tolerance of their peers' speech by nonnative speakers of the target second language (L2) than native speakers (Fayer & Krasinski, 1987;Sheorey, 1985). These conflicting findings may be partially due to differences in whether naive or trained raters are used, how adequately the raters are trained, and whether the raters undergo rigorous certification requirements.…”

“…Some research has shown that familiarity with the speaker's accent may lead to more lenient evaluations of the overall speech quality (Brodkey, 1972;Gass & Varonis, 1984;Smith & Bisazza, 1982;Smith & Rafiqzad, 1979).…”

Perceptual adaptation and intelligibility of multiple talkers for two types of degraded speech

“…This objective measure of speech intelligibility contrasts with other measures in which listeners subjectively rate the "intelligibility" of a speaker ͑also called comprehensibility; e.g., Fayer and Krasinski, 1987͒ or tests in which the listener must provide an accurate paraphrase of the talker's message for the talker's communicative intent to be considered effective ͑e.g., Brodkey, 1972͒. …”