Interactional intelligibility: the relationship between consonant modification and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

Abstract

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant modification and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca interactions in Japan. Some research has claimed that the full articulation of many consonants is critical to the maintenance of mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca interactions. Utilizing conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of segmental repair sequences among English speakers using English as a Lingua Franca at a Japanese university, this study claims that English speakers identify which words are unintelligible, and then modify the distinctive features of problematic consonants into more intelligible variants in order to successfully achieve mutual understanding. This study concludes that intelligible pronunciation is an interactional phenomenon that is dependent more on adjusting pronunciation during interaction and less on approximating the phonological standards of any one variety of English.