Expanding the scope of L2 intelligibility research

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2020-07-07
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Nagle, Charles
Huensch, Amanda
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World Languages and Cultures
The Department of World Languages and Cultures seeks to provide an understanding of other cultures through their languages, providing both linguistic proficiency and cultural literacy. Majors in French, German, and Spanish are offered, and other coursework is offered in Arabic, Chinese, Classical Greek, Latin, Portuguese, and Russian
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Abstract

This study investigated relationships among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of L2 learners of Spanish who completed a prompted response speaking task. Thirty native Spanish listeners from Spain were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk to transcribe and rate extracted utterances, which were also coded for grammatical and phonemic errors, and speaking rate. Descriptively, although most utterances were intelligible, their comprehensibility and accentedness varied substantially. Mixed-effects modeling showed that comprehensibility was significantly associated with intelligibility whereas accentedness was not. Additionally, phonemic and grammatical errors were significant predictors of intelligibility and comprehensibility, but only phonemic errors were significantly related to accentedness. Overall, phonemic errors displayed a stronger negative association with the listener-based dimensions than grammatical errors. These findings suggest that English-speaking learners of Spanish are not as uniformly intelligible and comprehensible as FL instructors might believe and shed light on relationships among speech constructs in an L2 other than English.

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This accepted article is published as Nagle, C. L., & Huensch, A. (July 7, 2020). Expanding the scope of L2 intelligibility research: Intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in L2 Spanish. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation. Doi: 10.1075/jslp.20009.nag . Posted with permission

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Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2020
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