FOREIGN ACCENT, COMPREHENSIBILITY, AND INTELLIGIBILITY IN THE SPEECH OF 2ND-LANGUAGE LEARNERS

This study examines the interrelationships among accentedness, perceived comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of L2 learners. Eighteen native speakers (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 listeners showed correlations between accentedness and perceived comprehensibility, and fewer still showed a relationship 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.