QUANTIFYING THE INTERLANGUAGE SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY BENEFIT

Hongyan Wang1 & Vincent J. van Heuven2
1Dept. of English, Shenzhen University, PR China; 2Phonetics Laboratory, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

ID 1263
[full paper]

Generally, native listeners of a target language are better at understanding foreign-accented speech than any other type of listener, with one possible exception: if the listener speaks the same mother tongue as the speaker, e.g. when Chinese speakers and listeners communicate in English, the information transfer may be more successful than with a native English listener. We review literature data, and present results of our own in an attempt to come up with the optimal quantification of this so-called interlanguage speech intelligibility effect. We argue that the benefit is best quantified in relative terms, as the residual in a linear model that remains after the main effects of speaker and hearer language background have been included.

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