Interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for non-native listeners of english

Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2012, Supervisor: Dr. Joan Carles Mora Bonilla There are different factors that influence speech intelligibility, including properties of the speech itself, the listeners‟ linguistic backgrounds and their familiarity with different speech varieties. Regarding the latter, an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) was hypothesized, which predicts that non-native listeners find speech with a familiar accent more in-telligible than native speech. This study examines whether non-native listeners of English show an ISIB due to a familiar accent and their proficiency in English. Therefore, the intelligibility of six speakers differing in L1 (English, Catalan and German) was assessed by 50 listeners differing in L1 (English, Catalan and German) and proficiency in English (high and low). Reaction time was used to detect differences in intelligibility, which is more sensitive than intelligibility measures used in other studies. Results show that, no matter of the L1, for non-native low proficiency listeners, utterances produced by speakers with a familiar accent were more intelligible than native English speech (ISIB-T). Familiar accented non-native English was more intelligible to high profi-ciency non-native listeners than to native English listeners (ISIB-L). In con-clusion, the L1 as well as the proficiency in the target language are crucial factors in intelligibility and more depending on the latter listeners show dif-ferent types of ISIB.