Intelligibility in Chinese English Spoken in Central China

Abstract

Abstract It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English, and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level of intelligibility. However, the features that are needed in order to make oneself easily understood by listeners from elsewhere remain controversial. The current research focuses on thirteen five-minute recordings of conversations between young speakers of English in central China and an interviewer from Britain, in order to determine which features of their speech gave rise to misunderstandings. It was found that, in the 18 tokens of misunderstanding identified, 4 resulted from lexical semantics (22%), 3 from Chinese place names (17%), 3 from grammar (17%) , and 11 from pronunciation (61%) (with some tokens cross-classified). The most common phonological factors giving rise to loss of intelligibility were omission of syllables and simplification of word-initial consonant clusters.