Empirical Approaches to Measuring the Intelligibility of Different Varieties of English in Predicting Listener Comprehension

Abstract

This study compared five research-based intelligibility measures as they were applied to six varieties of English. The objective was to determine which approach to measuring intelligibility would be most reliable for predicting listener comprehension, as measured through a listening comprehension test similar to the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The speakers included 18 English users representing six distinct varieties. These speakers' speech was evaluated by 60 listeners, users of the same English varieties who completed the listening comprehension test as well as five intelligibility tasks, all recorded by the speakers. The five measures of intelligibility included responses to true/false statements, scalar ratings of speech, perception of nonsense sentences, perception of filtered sentences, and transcription of speech; these measures were compared in terms of their relationship to listening comprehension scores using linear mixed-effects models. Results showed that the measure of intelligibility based on listeners' responses to nonsense sentences was the strongest predictor of the listening comprehension scores.

The Effects of International Accents and Shared First Language on Listening Comprehension Tests

“…Because the English proficiency of most speakers selected for this study was relatively high as university instructors, the lowest mean scores of comprehensibility and accentedness were 5.04 and 5.01 out of 7, respectively. More details about this additional test result can be found in Kang, Thomson, and Moran ().…”

“…The 18 TOEFL passages used were mock lectures that contained an introduction, body, and conclusion (ETS, ) and designed to measure test takers’ “ability to understand spoken English” (Educational Testing Service, ). They were selected based on the results of analyses of item difficulty, after incorporating information about the degree of difficulty (both actual and perceived) and familiarity completed by 45 TOEFL preparatory students (Kang et al., ). Each passage's questions usually comprised traditional multiple‐choice questions with four answer choices and a single correct answer.…”

Expanding the scope of L2 intelligibility research

“…In other words, the constructs were designed to capture speakers' ability to make themselves understood to a group of listeners with whom they might reasonably interact on a daily basis in their personal and professional lives. Since Munro and Derwing's original work, the constructs have taken on a life of their own and have been applied to different varieties of English (Kang et al, 2018) and different L2s, including German (O'Brien, 2014), French (Bergeron & Trofimovich, 2017), Spanish (Nagle, 2018), and Japanese (Saito & Akiyama, 2016), though most of the L2other-than-English work has focused on comprehensibility and accentedness. Given how far the constructs have travelled, it seems like the right time to reflect upon any necessary adaptations that might need to take place in order to conduct intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness research in a learning and teaching context that is in many ways radically different from the context in which the constructs were initially defined and measured.…”

Revisiting the Intelligibility and Nativeness Principles

“…There are a number of other implications from Table 2 (e.g., Jenkins, 2000;Kang, Thomson & Moran, 2018;McCullough, Clopper & Wagner, 2019;Smith & Rafiqzad, 1979), each of the contexts likely differs in how pronunciation instruction is addressed. As a result, there is no one-size-fitsall approach to teaching pronunciation.…”