The Intelligibility of Social Dialects for Working‐class Adult Learners of English

Abstract

This study investigated the intelligibility of three English dialects for 113 working‐class adult English learners in the New York metropolitan area. The relative intelligibility of standard English, New Yorkese, and black English for these students was rated based on comprehension of six tape‐recorded contextualized monologues, two in each dialect. Learner proficiency was rated by cloze procedure, and most students were found to be at the intermediate level. Results showed that English comprehension was significantly affected by dialect. Interestingly, black English was the least intelligible of the three dialects considered in spite of the fact that this population had considerable contact with black English speakers. Also, learner judgments of the speakers on the tapes in terms of job status, friendliness, and appearance paralleled the relative comprehensibility of the speech samples.

Non-native Listeners’ Recognition of High-Variability Speech Using PRESTO

“…Although non-native listeners benefitted from the presentation of the same talker on HINT at more favorable SNRs, allowing them to learn and use talker-contingent information encoded in the signal to benefit speech recognition, the non-native listeners were unable to rapidly adjust and optimally adapt to the highly variable changing test sentences on PRESTO from trial to trial. These results provide further support for the results reported in earlier studies showing that listeners benefit substantially from talker-contingent perceptual learning in speech recognition (e.g., Nygaard et al, 1994; Nygaard and Pisoni, 1998), as well as other reports showing that non-native listeners have much more difficulty understanding speech produced by talkers with different regional dialects or foreign accents (e.g., Eisenstein and Verdi, 1985; Fox and McGory, 2007; Ikeno and Hansen, 2007; Cooke et al, 2008). …”

“…However, unlike native listeners from Alabama, who were also quite accurate for the same set of Southern vowels, Japanese listeners living in Alabama did not exhibit a processing benefit for the Southern variety. Similarly, Eisenstein and Verdi (1985) found that English learners in New York City had much more difficulty in understanding African American English than either New York English or General American English. The findings from these studies suggest that although non-native listeners can use and benefit from low-level acoustic-phonetic talker differences related to gender, lack of exposure to different accents in the L2 may affect a listener’s ability to understand speech produced by talkers from different dialect regions.…”

Accent on communication: the impact of regional and foreign accent on comprehension in adults with aphasia

“…A variety of factors have been found to affect the comprehension of utterances produced with an unfamiliar accent, including grammatical complexity, familiarity with the topic [6] and with a particular speaker. A speaker's accent may elicit positive or negative reactions in the listener, depending on the stereotypes associated with a particular ethnic group [7] , and listeners with negative attitudes towards an accent tend to rate the speaker as more difficult to understand [8] .…”

Effects of speechreading and signal-to-noise ratio on understanding mainstream American English by American and Indian adults.

“…Speech comprehensibility (Derwing & Rossiter, 2003;Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998;Eisenstein & Verdi, 1985;Gass & Varonis, 1984) and foreign accentedness (Munro & Derwing, 1995a;Munro & Derwing, 1995b;Derwing & Rossiter, 2003) have been used on a 9-point Likert scale to judge speech intelligibility of foreign accentedness speech. Southwood and Flege (1999) reported that a 7-point scale is frequently used to rate speech comprehensibility and foreign accentedness; however, a 7-point scale may not be sensitive enough for listeners to discriminate among speech sentences, causing ceiling and floor effects.…”