Second language comprehensibility as a dynamic construct
This study examined longitudinal changes in second language (L2) interlocutors’ mutual comprehensibility ratings
(perceived ease of understanding speech), targeting comprehensibility as a dynamic, time-varying, interaction-centered construct.
In a repeated-measures, within-participants design, 20 pairs of L2 English university students from different language backgrounds
engaged in three collaborative and interactive tasks over 17 minutes, rating their partner’s comprehensibility at 2–3 minute
intervals using 100-millimeter scales (seven ratings per interlocutor). Mutual comprehensibility ratings followed a U-shaped
function over time, with comprehensibility (initially perceived to be high) being affected by task complexity but then reaching
high levels by the end of the interaction. The interlocutors’ ratings also became more similar to each other early on and remained
aligned throughout the interaction. These findings demonstrate the dynamic nature of comprehensibility between L2 interlocutors
and suggest the need for L2 comprehensibility research to account for the effects of interaction, task, and time on
comprehensibility measurements.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background literature
- 2.1Comprehensibility: A measure of understanding
- 2.2Comprehensibility: An index of processing fluency
- 2.3A dynamic approach to comprehensibility
- 3.The present study
- 4.Method
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Tasks
- 4.3Repeated assessments
- 4.4Procedure
- 5.Data analysis
- 5.1Coding
- 5.2Identification of covariates
- 5.3Statistical modeling
- 6.Results
- 6.1Comprehensibility across time
- 6.2Convergence or divergence in comprehensibility
- 6.3Interview responses
- 7.Discussion
- 7.1Time- and task-sensitive view of comprehensibility
- 7.2Between-speaker alignment in comprehensibility
- 8.Limitations and future work
- 9.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements and open materials and data statement
- Note
-
References
References
Baese-Berk, M.
(
2018)
Perceptual learning for native and non-native speech. In
K. D. Federmeier &
D. G. Watson (Eds.),
The psychology of learning and motivation: Current topics in language (pp. 1–29). Academic Press.
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S.
(
2015)
Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4.
Journal of Statistical Software, 671, 1–48.
Bergeron, A., & Trofimovich, P.
(
2017)
Linguistic dimensions of accentenedness and comprehensibility: Exploring task and listener effects in second language French.
Foreign Language Annals, 501, 547–566.
Berry, G. M., & Ernestus, M.
(
2018)
Phonetic alignment in English as a lingua franca: Coming together while splitting apart.
Second Language Research, 341, 343–370.
Brennan, S. E., Kuhlen, A. K., & Charoy, J.
(
2018)
Discourse and dialogue. In
S. L. Thompson-Schill (Ed.),
The Stevens’ handbook of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience (pp. 145–209). Wiley.
Clarke, C. M., & Garrett, M. F.
(
2004)
Rapid adaptation to foreign-accented English,
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1161, 3647–3658.
Cobb, T.
(
2019)
VocabProfilers [computer program].
[URL]
Crowther, D., Trofimovich, P., Isaacs, T., & Saito, K.
(
2015b)
Does speaking task affect second language comprehensibility? The Modern Language Journal, 991, 80–95.
Crowther, D., Trofimovich, P., Isaacs, T., & Saito, K.
(
2018)
Linguistic dimensions of L2 accentedness and comprehensibility vary across speaking tasks.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 401, 443–457.
Crowther, D., Trofimovich, P., Saito, K., & Isaacs, T.
(
2015a)
Second language comprehensibility revisited: Investigating the effects of learner background.
TESOL Quarterly, 491, 814–837.
de Bot, K., Lowie, W., & Verspoor, M.
(
2007)
A Dynamic Systems Theory approach to second language acquisition.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 101, 7–21.
Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J.
(
1997)
Accent, intelligibility, and comprehensibility: Evidence from four L1s.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 191, 1–16.
Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J.
Dragojevic, M., Giles, H., Beck, A.-C., & Tatum, N. T.
(
2017)
The fluency principle: Why foreign accent strength negatively biases language attitudes.
Communication Monographs, 841, 385–405.
ETS
(
2017)
TOEFL iBT® and IELTS® academic module scores: Score comparison tool.
[URL]
Flege, J., & Fletcher, K.
(
1992)
Talker and listener effects on the perception of degree of foreign accent.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 911, 370–389.
Galindo Ochoa, J. A.
(
2017)
The effect of task repetition on Colombian EFL students’ accuracy and fluency (Unpublished master’s thesis). Concordia University, Montreal.
Garrod, S., Tosi, A., & Pickering, M. J.
(
2018)
Alignment during interaction. In.
S.-A. Rueschemeyer &
M. G. Gaskell (Eds.),
The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 575–593). Oxford University Press.
Gibson, W., & Brown, A.
(
2009)
Working with qualitative data. Sage.
Giles, H., & Ogay, T.
(
2007)
Communication Accommodation Theory. In
B. B. Whaley &
W. Santer (eds.),
Explaining communication: Contemporary theories and exemplars (pp. 293–309). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Graf, L. K. M., Mayer, S., & Landwehr, J. R.
(
2018)
Measuring processing fluency: One versus five items.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, 281, 393–411.
Kang, O.
(
2012)
Impact of rater characteristics and prosodic features of speaker accentedness on ratings of international teaching assistants’ oral performance.
Language Assessment Quarterly, 91, 249–269.
Kleinschmidt, D. F., & Jaeger, T. F.
(
2015)
Robust speech perception: Recognize the familiar, generalize to the similar, and adapt to the novel.
Psychological Review, 1221, 148–203.
Kuperberg, G. R., & Jaeger, T. F.
(
2016)
What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 311, 32–59.
Matsuura, H., Chiba, R., & Fujieda, M.
(
1999)
Intelligibility and comprehensibility of American and Irish Englishes in Japan.
World Englishes, 181, 49–62.
Munro, M. J.
(
2018)
Dimensions of pronunciation. In
O. Kang,
R. I. Thomson, &
J. M. Murphy (Eds.),
The Routledge handbook of contemporary English pronunciation (pp. 413–431). Routledge.
Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M.
(
1995)
Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners.
Language Learning, 451, 73–97.
Nagle, C., Trofimovich, P., & Bergeron, A.
(
2019)
Toward a dynamic view of second language comprehensibility.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 411, 647–672.
Newman, E. J., Sanson, M., Miller, E. K., Quigley-McBride, A., Foster, J. L., Bernstein, D. M., & Garry, M.
(
2014)
People with easier to pronounce names promote truthiness of claims.
PLoS ONE, 9(2), e88671.
O’Brien, M. G.
(
2014)
L2 learners’ assessments of accentedness, fluency, and comprehensibility of native and nonnative German speech.
Language Learning, 641, 715–748.
Pakhomov, S. V., Kaiser, E. A., Boley, D. L., Marino, S. E., Knopman, D. S., & Birnbaum, A. K.
(
2011)
Effects of age and dementia on temporal cycles in spontaneous speech fluency.
Journal of Neurolinguistics, 241, 619–635.
R Core Team
(
2019)
R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Computer software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
[URL]
Reber, R., & Greifeneder, R.
(
2017)
Processing fluency in education: How metacognitive feelings shape learning, belief formation, and affect.
Educational Psychologist, 521, 84–103.
Robinson, P.
(
2005)
Cognitive complexity and task sequencing: Studies in a componential framework for second language task design.
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 431, 1–32.
Saito, K., & Shintani, N.
(
2016)
Do native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive comprehensibility in second language speech? TESOL Quarterly, 501, 421–446.
Saito, K., Trofimovich, P., & Isaacs, T.
(
2017)
Using listener judgements to investigate linguistic influences on L2 comprehensibility and accentedness: A validation and generalization study.
Applied Linguistics, 381, 439–462.
Sanchez, C. A., & Jaeger, A. J.
(
2015)
If it’s hard to read, it changes how long you do it: Reading time as an explanation for perceptual fluency effects on judgment.
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 221, 206–211.
Sanchez, C. A., & Khan, S.
(
2016)
Instructor accents in online education and their effect on learning and attitudes.
Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 321, 494–502.
Sheppard, B. E., Elliott, N. C., & Baese-Berk, M. M.
(
2017)
Comprehensibility and intelligibility of international student speech: Comparing perceptions of university EAP instructors and content faculty.
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 261, 42–51.
Singer, J. D., & Willett, J. B.
(
2003)
Applied longitudinal data analysis. Oxford University Press.
Song, H., & Schwarz, N.
(
2008)
If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation.
Psychological Science, 191, 986–988.
Trofimovich, P., & Isaacs, T.
(
2012)
Disentangling accent from comprehensibility.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 151, 905–916.
Xie, X., Weatherholtz, K., Bainton, L., Rowe, E., Burchill, Z., Liu, L., & Jaeger, T. F.
(
2018)
Rapid adaptation to foreign-accented speech and its transfer to an unfamiliar talker.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1431, 2013–2031.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Nagle, Charles L., Pavel Trofimovich, Mary Grantham O’Brien & Sara Kennedy
2021.
BEYOND LINGUISTIC FEATURES.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.