Dutch listeners’ responses to Dutch, British and American English accents in three contexts.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess Dutch listeners’ responses to native-accented Englishes compared with Dutch-accented English in terms of speech understandability and speech evaluations in three professional communication contexts. In a matched-guise experiment Dutch listeners (N=392) responded to a Dutch English, a standard British and American accent in terms of speech understandability (intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability) and speaker evaluations (status, affect, dynamism). Dutch listeners evaluated these accents in three communication contexts: Lecture, Audio Tour, Job Pitch. Only context affected speech understandability: comprehensibility and interpretability were higher for the Lecture compared to the Audio Tour and the Job Pitch. Accent only negatively affected status evaluations for Dutch-accented English. Context only evoked more affect in the Audio Tour and the Lecture than in the Job Pitch. Our main conclusion is that Dutch-accented English negatively impacts status, but not understanding, affect and dynamism. Context impacts understanding and affect.

Nativeness perception and speaker voice as predictors of (non-)native English speaker evaluations in four ELF contexts

“…In a follow-up study by Nejjari et al (2021), in which a Dutch listener group that was familiar with Dutch-accented English reacted to the same three accents, the Dutch listeners, in contrast to the German, Spanish, and Singaporean listeners, evaluated the status of Dutch-accented speech more negatively compared to native, standard English. This suggests that when non-native listeners are familiar with a particular nonnative English accent, they readily assign the accent non-native status, and apply a language norm that holds that non-native accented speech reflects a speaker that has lower status, compared to native-accented speech.…”

“…Using matched guises is believed to better ensure than verbal guises that responses to accents are not based on an individual speaker's voice (see further discussion in Nejjari et al 2019), but on the produced accents that, like verbal guises, need to sound authentic as well as natural (see Garrett 2010;Nejjari et al 2019) In order to understand the impact of assigning (non-)nativeness status to speakers, but also to what extent voice affects speaker evaluations in the context of English as a lingua franca, we used data collected by Nejjari et al's (2020Nejjari et al's ( , 2021 in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Singapore to conduct an cross-national, comparative study. Nejjari et al (2021Nejjari et al ( , 2020 collected data on reactions to matched and verbal guises of native, standard British and American English accents, and Dutch-accented English, but used the matched guises only to compare responses to the selected accents, to minimize the impact of voice. Native English in the context of this study thus refers to the accents produced by inner circle (British and American) speakers of English (Kachru, 1985) whereas the non-native English listeners in this study were expanding circle English speakers (Dutch, Spanish and German), but also outer circle speakers (Singaporean).…”

“…The responses to eight speakers of English were included in the current study. One male matched-guise speaker produced the three accents under study that represented the independent variable accent : (1) standard British English, (2) standard American English, and (3) the typical English accent of highly educated native speakers of Dutch (see Nejjari et al 2019Nejjari et al , 2020Nejjari et al , & 2021. The standard accents of British and American English refer in this study to accents generally associated with the national accent norm of these nations and are generally similar to what is commonly referred to as a standard British English accent and General American for a standard American English accent.…”

“…The listeners also answered comprehension questions for all speech samples. All comprehension or speech understandabilityscores were high, with little variation between listener groups, so did not impact speaker evaluations (see Nejjari et al 2021Nejjari et al , 2020 forspeech understandability results). Finally, listeners were asked to answer questions regarding their English language skills, what native languages they spoke, and biographical details.…”

“…were assessed for each speaker. Based on Nejjari et al (2012Nejjari et al ( , 2021Nejjari et al ( , 2020 and Grondelaers et al (2015), speaker evaluations were measured by asking listeners to indicate on 5-point Likert scales (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree; 3 = neither disagree nor agree) to what extent they believed the speaker possessed 11 personality traits, representing three dimensions: status(competent, educated, having authority, intelligent and cultured),affect (considerate, pleasant and friendly), and dynamism(energetic, enthusiastic, confident). The three dimensions are commonly employed in speaker evaluation research to gauge listener perceptions of a speaker's intelligence and competence (status), a speaker's likeability (affect), and their self-presentation (dynamism) (see e.g., Zahn & Hopper 1987;Grondelaers et al 2015).…”