English Intelligibility Research Articles

International intelligibility of English: directions and resources

ABSTRACT: This is a summary of the state‐of‐the‐art research in international intelligibility with emphasis on English. It also suggests some directions for future research. It is argued that in future research it would be desirable to make distinctions between three key concepts: intelligibility, comprehensibility and interpretability. The selected bibliography of 163 items has been assembled to give the reader an indication of how widespread this literature is, and at the same time to indicate its limitations. The sources searched include publications across various disciplines. This indicates that intelligibility can be approached from a variety of points of view and interests. Since intelligibility depends upon so many factors of different types involved in a given speech event, it is difficult to find ways of integrating approaches and parameters. That is a challenge for future research.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF SOCIAL DIALECTS FOR WORKING‐CLASS ADULT LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

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.

The other tongue: English across cultures Edited by Braj B. Kachru (review)

REVIEWS937 [ + ex], which in English must not be retained through more than one cycle of a phonological derivation (Hayes 1980). In Spanish, the antepenultimate stress of adjectives such as simbólico 'symbolic' and húmedo 'damp' stems from the extrametricality ofthe respective penultimate vowels ? e. Is this feature to be removed in the phonological derivation of simbólico -* simbólicamente 'symbolically' or húmedo —» húmedamente 'damply'? Whatever merit such questions might have, and notwithstanding the healthy state offlux prevalent in generative phonology (e.g., questions have been raised challenging the status of the foot level in prosodie structures), Harris' contributions will unequivocally pave the way for the future study and investigation of phonological topics in Hispanic linguistics, and possibly in Romance phonology as well. REFERENCES Granda, Germán de. 1966. La estructura silábica. (Revista de Filología Española, anejo 81.) Madrid. Harris, James W. 1969. Spanish phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ------ . 1974. Morphologization ofphonological rules: An example from Chicano Spanish. Linguistic studies in Romance languages, edited by R. J. Campbell et al., 8-27. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Hayes, Bruce P. 1980. A metrical theory of stress rules. MIT dissertation. Hooper, Joan B. 1976. An introduction to natural generative phonology. New York: Academic Press. ------ , and Tracy Terrell. 1976. Stress assignment in Spanish: A natural generative analysis. Glossa 10.64-110. Malmberg, Bertil. 1948. La structure syllabique de l'espagnol. Boletim de Filología 9.99-120. Navarro Tomás, Tomás. 1968. Studies in Spanish phonology. Miami: University of Miami Press. Saporta, Sol, and Heles Contreras. 1962. A phonological grammar of Spanish. Seattle: University of Washington Press. [Received 4 October 1983.] The other tongue: English across cultures. Edited by Braj B. Kachru. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Pp. xv, 358. $17.50. Reviewed by William C. Ritchie, Syracuse University This is an extremely useful and stimulating collection of twenty papers on the acquisition, use and social functions of non-native varieties of English (NNVE's)—e.g. Indian and African English. As Charles A. Ferguson notes in his foreword, the rapid spread of English as a world language has led to an equally rapid increase in the importance of NNVE's, so that 'English is less and less regarded as a European language, and its development is less and less determined by the usage of its native speakers' (p. x). In Kachru's words, this anthology is 'both the culmination of a collective effort in shared research interests, and a step toward my long-standing personal goal of understanding English across cultures' (xiii). In fact, twelve of the contributions to the book are substantially revised versions of papers given at a conference organized by K, and held in conjunction with the 1978 LSA Institute at Champaign-Urbana. 938LANGUAGE, VOLUME 60, NUMBER 4 (1984) A major purpose for the collection is the 'legitimation' of NNVE's both as local standards (hence, as local models for the teaching of English as a second language), and as objects of scholarly attention and research. The first concern is clearly a matter of social policy, and is directed primarily at teachers of English as a second language. The second is directed at linguists, sociolinguists, second-language researchers, and other scholars interested in the general topic of language spread. Over-all, the volume serves this purpose very well indeed. The first major section of the book, 'English in non-native contexts: Directions and issues', contains four papers: Joshua Fishman, 'Sociology of English as an additional language', 15-22; Peter Strevens, 'The localized forms of English ', 23-30; B. B. Kachru, 'Models for non-native Englishes', 31-57; and Cecil Nelson, 'Intelligibility and non-native varieties of English', 58-76. Fishman describes the current world language situation as 'an international sociolinguistic balance of power' (15), both influencing and influenced by the association of English with 'technological modernity and power'. Also contributing to the situation are 'the local regulation of the use of English and the special protection of local indigenous languages Strevens notes a number of variables which determine both forms and functions of distinct ('localized') types of English, as well as variables which condition individual differences among speakers of a single...

Intonation and intelligibility of time-compressed speech. Supplementary report: English vs. French.

Comparative data are reported for the intelligibility of English and of French time-compressed speech when heard spoken either in normal intonation or in intonation patterns conflicting with underlying syntactic structure. Within an overall decrement in intelligibility with increasing compression, both French and English show similar superiority functions for sentences heard in normal intonation. Results suggest a role of prosodic features in perceptual processing of French comparable to that previously reported for English.

Development of a Synthetic Sentence-Identification Task in Spanish

The use of a closed-message set of synthetic or artificial sentences has been explored in studies on speech intelligibility in English for the past 4 yr. Each alternative sentence was constructed as an approximation to a real sentence by selecting each successive word on the basis of the conditional probabilities of word sequences. This method for generating test materials can, in theory, be generalized to any language that is characterized by rules of syntax. This paper describes the development and evaluation of synthetic sentence message sets in the Spanish language. Performance-intensity functions in quiet and in the presence of a competing speech message will be described and compared with similar data for English sentences. The advantages of the synthetic sentences for assessing speech-discrimination scores for hearing-impaired Spanish-speaking listeners will be described.