THE MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY OF L2 SPEECH

TLDR

Listeners’ perception of foreign‑accented speech is shaped by both the speech itself and the listeners’ linguistic backgrounds, yet it remains unclear how similarly diverse listeners respond to L2 speech. The study had Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin, and English native listeners rate foreign‑accented English utterances spoken by native Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish speakers. Listeners from different native languages showed moderate‑to‑high agreement on intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness, with only small between‑group differences and no consistent advantage for their own accent. The study was funded by two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants, and the authors thanked reviewers, listeners, and speakers for their contributions.

Abstract

When understanding or evaluating foreign-accented speech, listeners are affected not only by properties of the speech itself but by their own linguistic backgrounds and their experience with different speech varieties. Given the latter influence, it is not known to what degree a diverse group of listeners might share a response to second language (L2) speech. In this study, listeners from native Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin, and English backgrounds evaluated the same set of foreign-accented English utterances from native speakers of Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. Regardless of native language background, the listener groups showed moderate to high correlations on intelligibility scores and comprehensibility and accentedness ratings. Although some between-group differences emerged, the groups tended to agree on which of the 48 speakers were the easiest and most difficult to understand; between-group effect sizes were generally small. As in previous studies, the listeners did not consistently exhibit an intelligibility benefit for speech produced in their own accent. These findings support the view that properties of the speech itself are a potent factor in determining how L2 speech is perceived, even when the listeners are from diverse language backgrounds.This work was supported by two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first two authors. The authors thank J. E. Flege and three anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper as well as the listeners and speakers for their willingness to participate in the study. The listening stimuli used here were also used in a paper published in SSLA in 1997.