Abstract
This paper asks whether there is an ‘interlanguage intelligibility benefit’ in perception of word-stress, as has been reported for global sentence recognition. L1 English listeners, and L2 English listeners who are L1 speakers of Arabic dialects from Jordan and Egypt, performed a binary forced-choice identification task on English near-minimal pairs (such as[ˈɒbdʒɛkt] ~ [əbˈdʒɛkt]) produced by an L1 English speaker, and two L2 English speakers from Jordan and Egypt respectively. The results show an overall advantage for L1 English listeners, which replicates the findings of an earlier study for general sentence recognition, and which is also consistent with earlier findings that L1 listeners rely more on structural knowledge than on acoustic cues in stress perception. Non-target-like L2 productions of words with final stress (which are primarily cued in L1 production by vowel reduction in the initial unstressed syllable) were less accurately recognized by L1 English listeners than by L2 listeners, but there was no evidence of a generalized advantage for L2 listeners in response to other L2 stimuli.
Highlights
An ‘interlanguage intelligibility benefit’ has been reported for global sentence perception (Bent & Bradlow, 2003), whereby L2 English listeners outperform L1 English listeners in a sentence recognition task on the productions of other L2 speakers
Accuracy is above chance for English listeners in response to all stimuli produced by the native speaker (NE) speaker, and there is a ceiling effect for English listeners in response to stimuli elicited with initial stress
It appears that English listeners are somewhat more accurate than Egyptian Arabic (EA) listeners, who are in turn somewhat more accurate than Jordanian Arabic (JA) listeners, but that there is little effect of stimulus language for the Arabic listeners
Summary
An ‘interlanguage intelligibility benefit’ has been reported for global sentence perception (Bent & Bradlow, 2003), whereby L2 English listeners outperform L1 English listeners in a sentence recognition task on the productions of other L2 speakers. We explore whether non-target-like phonetic realization of stress in L2 speakers’ productions results in intelligibility issues for L1 and/or L2 listeners in a word recognition task on English stress near-minimal pairs. The present study offers a first exploration of an eventual interlanguage intelligibility benefit due to transfer of L1 patterns in the acoustic realization of stress into L2 productions. We explore the general issue of whether non-target-like acoustic realization of word stress leads to reduced intelligibility of L2 speech, by L1 and/or L2 listeners. Studies which avoid the stress versus accent confound instead report duration, spectral balance and formant frequencies as the most consistent cues in English (Bouchhioua, 2016; van Heuven & Sluijter, 1996)
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