The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit-listeners for Chinese accented English liquids.

Abstract

This study investigated the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English liquids for native English, Chinese, and Korean listeners. The lateral /l/ and the retroflex /r/ in syllable initial and final positions were examined in three different contexts: segment, word, and sentence. Three groups of listeners with different language backgrounds accomplished a forced-choice identification task. For Chinese talkers’ production of the English liquids, both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefits for listeners (ISIB-L) occurred in all the four positions except for the initial /l/ produced by low proficiency Chinese talkers. The ISIB-L, however, held only for high proficiency non-native listeners. The only exception was the syllable initial /l/ stimuli produced by low proficiency Chinese talkers in such a way that native English listeners were more accurate than Chinese and Korean listeners at identifying the strong Chinese accented syllable initial /l/ sound. Considering the contextual effects on ISIB-L, matched ISIB-L only occurred for high proficiency listeners in the segment context. There was evidence of both matched and mismatched ISIB-L effects only for high proficiency listeners in word context. In the sentence context, English listeners performed better than all non-native listeners; therefore, there was no evidence for ISIB-L.