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25 years of Intelligibility, Comprehensibility and Accentedness
Edited by John M. Levis, Tracey M. Derwing and Murray J. Munro
[Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 6:3] 2020
► pp. 329–351

Expanding the scope of L2 intelligibility research

Intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in L2 Spanish

ORCID logo | Iowa State University
ORCID logo | University of Pittsburgh

This study investigated relationships among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of L2 learners of Spanish who completed a prompted response speaking task. Thirty native Spanish listeners from Spain were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk to transcribe and rate extracted utterances, which were also coded for grammatical and phonemic errors, and speaking rate. Descriptively, although most utterances were intelligible, their comprehensibility and accentedness varied substantially. Mixed-effects modeling showed that comprehensibility was significantly associated with intelligibility whereas accentedness was not. Additionally, phonemic and grammatical errors were significant predictors of intelligibility and comprehensibility, but only phonemic errors were significantly related to accentedness. Overall, phonemic errors displayed a stronger negative association with the listener-based dimensions than grammatical errors. These findings suggest that English-speaking learners of Spanish are not as uniformly intelligible and comprehensible as FL instructors might believe and shed light on relationships among speech constructs in an L2 other than English.

Keywords: intelligibility, comprehensibility, accentedness, L2 Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
      • 3.1.1Speakers
      • 3.1.2Listeners
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Analysis
      • 3.4.1Data coding
      • 3.4.2Mixed-Effect Models
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Relationships among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness
    • 4.2Phonemic and grammatical errors
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Intelligibility, Comprehensibility, and Accentedness
    • 5.2Phonemic and grammatical errors
    • 5.3Other factors
    • 5.4Adapting listener-based constructs to a new research context
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.20009.nag
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