Abstract
This paper examines criteria underlying the development of tasks and materials for the measurements of speech intelligibility in five South-Eastern Bantu languages. The chief considerations include utterance length, word familiarity and structure, and phonetic balance. It is established that the foundation research necessary for devising materials in South-Eastern Bantu languages on the same basis as those of English has not yet been conducted. Salient properties of the relevant African languages include multilingualism, dialectal variation, vocabulary differences between rural and urban speakers of the same language, borrowed words, the simple vowel systems, the fairly elaborate consonant systems, prosodic features, certail syllable structure characteristics, and noun morphology. A rationale for the use of two measures of intelligibility is presented, while the need to adapt many criteria characterising English materials is demonstrated.
Highlights
This paper examines criteria underlying the development of tasks and materials for the measurement of speech intelligibility in five SouthEasternBantu languages
While single words regularly form the basis of speech intelligibility scores, researchers frequently comment that singleword performance does not permit the evaluation of several critical parameters of speech, such as the effects of juncture, rhythm and stress patterns, and rate control (e.g. Griggs, 1958)
Several interrelated phenomena further complicate the application of the principle of word familiarity to South-Eastern Bantu languages, exerting their influences predominantly on the choice of vocabulary items appropriate for single-word intelligibility testing. These include the factors of multilingualism, vocabulary differences between urban and rural speakers of a language, mutual intelligibility in the face of dialectal variation, and the prevalence of borrowed words
Summary
Isolated aspects of the third component are relevant here: irrespective of the nature of the materials that are selected, or the manner in which the listener responds to the signal, the mass of methodological details pertaining to stimulus presentation and listener characteristics is largely independent of the language of the speaker and warrants routine consideration.
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