The Perception Study On The Intelligibility Of Chinese College Students' Accented English

Intelligibility refers to accentedness,comprehensibility,and intelligibility(understanding in the present study),which are in a continuum of degree of understanding and degree of processing difficulty(Munro & Derwing,1995a).Previous studies on intelligibility reached the consensus on the weak correlation between accentedness and understanding.However,these studies were not comprehensive enough,because they mainly focused on segmentals and seldom explored the effects of both segmentals and supra-segmentals systematically.Moreover,studies on the intelligibility of Chinese accented English was limited and they failed to explore the effects of segmental or prosodic features on intelligibility.Further,they seldom considered the degree of speakers' accentedness and listeners' English proficiency.Nevertheless,intelligible speech is closely related to the success of communication,calling for further investigation.The present study selected 60 audio clips of Chinese college students' English speeches as stimuli,which ranged from native-like production to extremely accented speech.Three experts were invited to rate the degree of accentedness.29 Chinese college students with different English proficiency levels and 10 native speakers of English participated in this perception experiment.Three tasks were designed to tap into each aspect of intelligibility respectively,i.e.rating of accentedness,rating of comprehensibility,and sentence dictation.After participants completing three tasks,22 native speakers and non-native speakers of all participants were randomly selected totake part in the semi-structured interview.Through quantitative analysis of the mixed-effects model and qualitative analysis of interview data,the present study aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What is the relationship among the speakers' English accent,the listeners' difficulties in comprehension,and the listeners' actual understanding? Does the perception pattern differ as a function of listener factors(L1background and English proficiency)?(2)Which phonetic features of Chinese accented English affect the perception of intelligibility? Do these features vary as a function of listener factors(L1 background and English proficiency)? The major findings can be summarized as follows:(1)Accentedness showed a moderate positive relationship with comprehensibility and a weak correlation with understanding,supporting the previous findings that accented speech does not necessarily preclude successful communication.Meanwhile,all the Chinese listeners gave higher rating scores than native English speakers did in both accentedness and comprehensibility task,supporting interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit hypothesis(Bent & Bradlow,2003).Moreover,the dictation accuracy of intermediate-level learners was significantly lower than those of proficient learners and natives,but no significant difference between proficient learners and native speakers was found.This indicates the importance of English proficiency in understanding.(2)Based on the analysis of the 8 phonetic features(segmentals,lexical stress,sentence stress,intonation,fluency,enunciation,speech rate,and rhythm),their influence on intelligibility exhibited similarities and differences.For accentedness,the rank for the influence of phonetic features was as follows: segmentals,sentence stress,rhythm,intonation and lexical stress,which suggested that listeners tended to rely on intuition to make judgments.Meanwhile,natives and proficient learners were more sensitive to prosodic features,like sentence stress,rhythm and intonation,reflecting the impact of L1 background and exposure to English.For comprehensibility,the rank for the influence of phonetic features was as follows: segmentals,enunciation,stress,fluency,speech rate and intonation,indicating the relationship between input quality and the difficulty of processing meaning.Besides,speech rate had a greater impact onlisteners with intermediate-level learners,and stress and intonation were more critical for proficient learners and natives.Such difference revealed the effects of English proficiency on meaning processing patterns.For understanding,pronunciation was still the major factor.Further interview data showed the vital role of pronunciation,enunciation and stressed information in understanding.Likewise,native speakers showed higher sensitivity to pitch changes.Theoretically,results of the present study further disentangle accentedness from understanding,proving the findings of previous research.The present study has also investigated the effect of listener factors on intelligibility,thereby providing empirical evidence for the research on L2 speech intelligibility.Practically,results reveal the phonetic features affecting the intelligibility of Chinese students' accented English and provide implications for both teachers and students in English pronunciation teaching and assessment.