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ACCENT, INTELLIGIBILITY, AND COMPREHENSIBILITY

Evidence from Four L1s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1997

Tracey M. Derwing  and
Murray J. Munro
Tracey M. Derwing
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Murray J. Munro
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Abstract

This study was designed to extend previous research on the relationships among intelligibility, perceived comprehensibility, and accentedness. Accent and comprehensibility ratings and transcriptions of accented speech from Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish intermediate ESL students were obtained from 26 native English listeners. The listeners were also asked to identify the first language backgrounds of the same talkers and to provide information on their familiarity with the four accents used in this study. When the results of this study were compared with the Munro and Derwing (1995, Language Learning, 45, 73–97) study of learners of high proficiency, speaker proficiency level did not appear to affect the quasi-independent relationships among intelligibility, perceived comprehensibility, and accentedness; however, the relative contributions of grammatical and phonemic errors and goodness of prosody differed somewhat. Ability to identify the speakers' first languages was influenced by familiarity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

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