Abstract
This study investigated the effect of foreign accent on the understanding of spoken texts in two different contexts: (1) when listeners extract surface level meaning of simple utterances, labelled “intelligibility in simple tasks” (IS) below, and (2) when they answer content questions to a complex text, labelled “intelligibility in complex tasks” (IC) below. We hypothesised that foreign accented speech would require more cognitive processing in all situations, but that it would have little detrimental effect on intelligibility in the simpler of the two tasks. We expected decreased intelligibility as a result of combining the increased cognitive workload of the foreign accent with the higher cognitive demands of the second task. In other words, the study investigated an interaction effect between task complexity and processing difficulties caused by accented speech. In Experiment 1, IS and processing times were measured in a sentence verification task with ten native and non-native speakers of English. Two speakers, with similar intelligibility but yielding different reaction times, were selected for Experiment 2, which measured IC using simulated university lectures. The results indicate the hypothesised interaction between context and the understanding of accented speech. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of this, as well as the relevance of our results for English-medium instruction at Nordic universities.
Highlights
The effect of accent on lecture comprehension is an interesting aspect of English-medium instruction in higher education and has been commented on by university students in several studies, e.g. Hellekjær (2010)
In EMI lectures, the cognitive load is already quite high because of the demanding task itself: to acquire new knowledge based on a presentation of typically complex information. This leads to the main question which we investigate in this paper: Will students learn less from a complex lecture if the lecturer’s accent of English can be shown to increase the cognitive load as measured by response time on simpler listening tasks?
The success rates varied from 90% to 98.8%, which means that all speakers were very intelligible in this task
Summary
The effect of (often foreign) accent on lecture comprehension is an interesting aspect of English-medium instruction in higher education and has been commented on by university students in several studies, e.g. Hellekjær (2010). The effect of (often foreign) accent on lecture comprehension is an interesting aspect of English-medium instruction in higher education and has been commented on by university students in several studies, e.g. Previous studies on the intelligibility of accented speech have usually focussed on simple tasks, where the significance of a foreign accent has often been found to be quite small. We believe that the effect of processing difficulties associated with accent can be considerably larger in the context of university lectures in which English is used as a lingua franca, which is an increasingly common scenario in universities across the Nordic countries. “Foreign accent, cognitive load and intelligibility of EMI lectures.”. “Foreign accent, cognitive load and intelligibility of EMI lectures.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 16(3):107137
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
