The Effects Of Listeners’ Dialect Backgrounds And English Pronunciation Proficiency On Their Intelligibility Of /n/-/l/ Produced By Chinese Learners Of English

Under the background of globalization,English has become an international language or lingua franca.More non-native English speakers use English for international communication.Can non-native English speakers,non-native English speakers and native English speakers understand each other?This requires the concept of intelligibility.Many scholars have studied the intelligibility of various varieties of English,such as Japanese English and Singaporean English.However,the intelligibility of Mandarin-accented English is a less studied area.Although some studies have showed that English learners in Wu dialect area have problems in/n/-/l/production,there is no study about the intelligibility of/n/-/l/consonants produced by Chinese learners of English from different dialect areas.Based on Language Transfer Theory,Contrastive Analysis and Speech Learning Model,this study investigated the intelligibility of the listeners from Northern China dialect area,Wu dialect area and English countries to the/n/-/l/sounds with different positions in a syllable and with different neighbourhood density produced by Chinese English learners(Northern China dialect area and Wu dialect area).Research questions are as follows:(1)To what extent do listeners’ dialect backgrounds influence the intelligibility of English consonants/n/-/l/produced by Mandarin-accented English speech?(2)To what extent does listeners’ English pronunciation proficiency influence the intelligibility of English consonants/n/-/l/produced by Mandarin-accented English speech?The participants in this experiment were divided into talkers and listeners.Talkers,twenty students from Yangzhou university(ten from Northern China dialect area and ten from Wu dialect area),read 48 English sentences(32 sentences including/n/-/l/sounds and 16 fillers).Listeners were twenty students from Yangzhou university(non-native English listeners)and eight native English listeners.Among them,non-native English listeners were labeled as high and low proficient listeners:10 high proficient listeners and 10 low proficient listeners,with the result of an Accentedness Judgement Task.All listeners were asked to finish a Word Identification Task according to the recording that they heard.The data produced by listeners are calculated and analyzed by SPSS and EXCEL.Results showed that:1)As for listeners from Northern China dialect area and Wu dialect area,there was no effect of dialect backgrounds on the intelligibility of/n/-/l/sounds produced by Chinese English learners.However,as for native Mandarin and native English listeners,listeners’ mother tongue had a limited effect on the intelligibility of/n/-/l/sounds produced by Chinese English learners.Specially,when perceiving final/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in minimal pairs,Chinese listeners got higher identification accuracy ratings than native English listeners,which indicated the ISIB-L holding for Chinese listeners perceiving the final/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in minimal pairs;when perceiving initial/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in non-minimal pairs,Chinese listeners did not outperform native English listeners,which indicated no ISIB-L holding for Chinese listeners listening to the initial/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in non-minimal pairs.2)As for high and low proficient listeners from Northern China dialect area and Wu dialect area,listeners’ English pronunciation proficiency had a limited effect on the intelligibility of/n/-/l/sounds produced by Chinese English learners.Specially,when perceiving final/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in minimal pairs,high proficient listeners could get a higher identification accuracy rating than low proficient listeners,which showed the effect of listeners’ proficiency on their intelligibility to final/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in minimal pairs;when perceiving initial/n/-/l/and/n/-/l/in non-minimal pairs,there was no significance between high and low proficient listenersThe results of this study suggested that the pronunciation of some Chinese learners(Such as final/n/-/l/consonants in the experiment)did not affect the communication with Chinese listeners,but it would affect the communication between Chinese learners and native English speakers.The results showed that teachers whose first language was Chinese should not only take their own understanding as the standard in teaching,but should have a deep understanding of the intelligibility of Chinese college students’ English pronunciation and the specific pronunciation problems of each student.At the same time,the results of this study provided some enlightenment for the setting of intelligibility index in oral English test The current study only considered Chinese students as the non-native English listeners However,in the trend of globalization,Chinese use English to communicate with other non-native English speakers.Therefore,future researches can use other English learners in China and non-native English speakers other than Chinese as listeners to further investigate the international intelligibility of speech produced by Chinese English learners.