Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners

Abstract

This study examines the interrelationships among accentedness, perceived comprehensibility, and intelligi bility in the speech of L2 learners. Eighteen native speak ers (NSs) of English listened to excerpts of extemporaneous English speech produced by 10 Mandarin NSs and two English NSs. We asked the listeners to transcribe the utterances in standard orthography and to rate them for degree of foreign‐accentedness and comprehensibility on 9‐ point scales. We assigned the transcriptions intelligibility scores on the basis of exact word matches. Although the utterances tended to be highly intelligible and highly rated for comprehensibility, the accent judgment scores ranged widely, with a noteworthy proportion of scores at the “heavily‐accented” end of the scale. We calculated Pearson correlations for each listener's intelligibility, accentedness, and comprehensibility scores and the phonetic, phonemic, and grammatical errors in the stimuli, as well as goodness of intonation ratings. Most listeners showed significant correlations between accentedness and errors, fewer lis teners showed correlations between accentedness and per ceived comprehensibility, and fewer still showed a rela tionship between accentedness and intelligibility. The findings suggest that although strength of foreign accent is correlated with perceived comprehensibility and intelligibility, a strong foreign accent does not necessarily reduce the comprehensibility or intelligibility of L2 speech.

Student Teachers’ Cognition about L2 Pronunciation Instruction: A Case Study

“…This is problematic because pronunciation is considered to be an important area of L2 learning (Celce-Murcia, et al, 2010) with intelligibility being regarded as the instructional target instead of native-like pronunciation (Derwing & Munro, 2005;Munro & Derwing, 2015). In fact, pronunciation research has shown that having an accent does not impede intelligibility (Munro & Derwing, 1995), and therefore mutual understanding through intelligible speech should be the aspirational model in the L2 classroom (Couper, 2006). In order to achieve L2 learner intelligibility, experts advocate a balanced approach to pronunciation instruction that includes the teaching of individual sounds (vowels and consonants) and prosodic elements such as stress, rhythm and intonation (Grant, 2014).…”

Speech recognition error patterns for steady-state noise and interrupted speech

“…Error coding has been utilized extensively to examine speech production errors, such as slips of the tongue in normal, unimpaired speakers (e.g., Boomer and Laver, 1973;Tweney et al, 1975), as well as for analyzing production errors of individuals with neurological injury (e.g., aphasia; Dell et al, 1997) and for speakers of a second language (e.g., Munro and Derwing, 1995;Izumi et al, 2004). Errors are often characterized based on how close the production is to the target, and whether they are considered an error of the phonological or lexical level of word production.…”

Current trends and future directions in teaching English pronunciation

“…Intelligibility means whether an utterance is understood by an interlocutor or not. It is often measured by having listeners transcribe utterances (Munro & Derwing, 1995).…”

“…In recent years, investigations have been conducted to assess how various aspects of pronunciation make contributions to intelligibility. For example, prosodic features play an important role in both accent ratings and intelligibility scores (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992;Munro & Derwing, 1995). More specifically, primary sentence stress (Hahn, 2004), word stress (Field, 2005;Zielinski, 2008) and speaking rate (Munro & Derwing, 2001) affect intelligibility.…”