Abstract
This study investigated the intelligibility of three English dialects for 113 working‐class adult English learners in the New York metropolitan area. The relative intelligibility of standard English, New Yorkese, and black English for these students was rated based on comprehension of six tape‐recorded contextualized monologues, two in each dialect. Learner proficiency was rated by cloze procedure, and most students were found to be at the intermediate level. Results showed that English comprehension was significantly affected by dialect. Interestingly, black English was the least intelligible of the three dialects considered in spite of the fact that this population had considerable contact with black English speakers. Also, learner judgments of the speakers on the tapes in terms of job status, friendliness, and appearance paralleled the relative comprehensibility of the speech samples.
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