Exploring the intelligibilty of foreign-accented English vowels when ‘‘English’’ is ill-defined

Abstract

Many studies of foreign-accented speech have been conducted in second language settings in which learners are assumed to be exposed to a relatively homogeneous non-native sound system. However, foreign language learners, who learn an additional language in a setting where this language is not the primary medium of communication, are frequently exposed to a range of varieties of the target language which may differ considerably with respect to their sound systems. The present study examined and compared the intelligibility of English monophthongs produced by two speaker groups: Native Danes who had learned English as a foreign language (with exposure to different native and non-native varieties) and native English speakers from Australia, the US, and the UK. Ten native Canadian-English listeners, who were familiar with native and non-native accents of English, identified the 11 monophthongs of English produced by the speaker groups in a /bVt/ context. As expected, the listeners’ error patterns were specific for each speaker group. However, reduced intelligibility was observed for much the same vowels irrespective of speaker group. Our results suggest that one source of problems in learning the sounds of English is the heterogeneity of English vowel systems in addition to transfer from the native language.