The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit

TLDR

The study examined how a listener’s native language background influences the intelligibility of non‑native speakers’ speech when listeners share or differ from the speaker’s native language. Native speakers of Chinese, Korean, and English recorded simple English sentences, which were then evaluated by native listeners of English, Chinese, Korean, and a mixed group in a sentence‑recognition task. Results showed that native English listeners preferred the native English talker, while non‑native listeners found speech from a highly proficient same‑language talker as intelligible as a native talker, and this benefit also applied when the talker and listeners had different native languages.

Abstract

This study investigated how native language background influences the intelligibility of speech by non-native talkers for non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talker. Native talkers of Chinese (n=2), Korean (n=2), and English (n=1) were recorded reading simple English sentences. Native listeners of English (n=21), Chinese (n=21), Korean (n=10), and a mixed group from various native language backgrounds (n=12) then performed a sentence recognition task with the recordings from the five talkers. Results showed that for native English listeners, the native English talker was most intelligible. However, for non-native listeners, speech from a relatively high proficiency non-native talker from the same native language background was as intelligible as speech from a native talker, giving rise to the “matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.” Furthermore, this interlanguage intelligibility benefit extended to the situation where the non-native talker and listeners came from different language backgrounds, giving rise to the “mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.” These findings shed light on the nature of the talker–listener interaction during speech communication.