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

Abstract

One of the chief goals of most second language learners is to be understood in their second language by a wide range of interlocutors in a variety of contexts. Although a nonnative accent can sometimes interfere with this goal, prior to the publication of this study, second language researchers and teachers alike were aware that an accent itself does not necessarily act as a communicative barrier. Nonetheless, there had been very little empirical investigation of how the presence of a nonnative accent affects intelligibility, and the notions of "heavy accent" and "low intelligibility" had often been confounded. Some of the key findings of the study-that even heavily accented speech is sometimes perfectly intelligible and that prosodic errors appear to be a more potent force in the loss of intelligibility than phonetic errors-added support to some common, but weakly substantiated beliefs. The study also provided a framework for a program of research to evaluate the ways This research was supported in part by a grant from the University of Alberta to the second author and a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship to the first author. Thanks to J. Flege, B. Derwing, A. Schmidt, H. Southwood, N. Takagi and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

Phonological Awareness and Speech Comprehensibility: An Exploratory Study

“…Overall, the consistency among raters is satisfactory. This is in line with the results reported by Derwing and Munro (1997) and Munro and Derwing (1995), who have also reported that untrained listeners produce highly reliable ratings.…”

“…This paper examines the contribution of one possible factor to speech comprehensibility (hereafter, comprehensibility) differences, that of phonological awareness. By comprehensibility, we follow Munro and Derwing (1995), who describe comprehensibility as perceived ease of understanding. Like other metalinguistic abilities, phonological awareness is a construct, which is measured by how well learners can focus on the structure of the L2 system, in this case, the phonology.…”

Audiovisual Training Effects on L2 Speech Perception and Production

“…In addition to the factors discussed above, individual variances in gender (Reid, 1987;Powell and Baters, 1985;Kaylani, 1996;Oxford, Nyikos and Ehrman, 1988;Oxford, 1993), motivations (Gardner, 1985;Taylor, 1974;Lenneberg, 1967;MacNamara, 1973), language learning strategies (Ellis, 1985), cognitive abilities (Skehan, 1998), intelligibilities (Munro and Derwing, 1995) and so on, may also lead to language learners' differences in L2 speech perception and/or production performance. Moreover, language learners were reported to vary significantly in terms of lip-reading skills (Demores, Bernstein, and DeHaven 1996), the degree of sensitivity to visual cues (Sennema et al, 2003), as well as the ability to integrate auditory and visual information in speech perception (Grant and Seitz, 1998).…”

Audiovisual Tools for Phonetic and Articulatory Visualization in Computer-Aided Pronunciation Training

“…Second language learners often show severe problems in learning phonetic segmental features of speech sounds as well as prosodic features of target languages since learning is influenced by the phonetic segmental and prosodic knowledge concerning their native language [1,2]. Since the vocabulary and the grammar of a foreign language can be acquired by using mainly cognitive learning strategies, i.e.…”

“…The resulting L2 foreign accent is easily detectable for speakers which are familiar with the target language (e.g. native speakers of the target language), while second language learners often are not even aware of their phonetic faults with respect to L2 [1,2].…”