English nowadays functions as a global lingua franca, enabling communication amongst non-native and native speakers from a vast range of different linguacultural backgrounds. One area of language in which English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers exhibit a particularly high level of diversity (Jenkins 2000:1) and which has been found to be an important source of communication breakdowns in previous studies (Jenkins 2000, Deterding 2013) is pronunciation. Jenkins (2000) hypothesized that the reason for this might be that non-native speakers (who constitute the majority of ELF speakers) rely too much on the acoustic signal rather than making use of contextual cues when processing each other’s accents. However, other studies (e.g. Osimk 2009) have shown that ELF users may profit from co-textual and contextual cues in speech perception, yet their exact effect on phonological intelligibility for ELF listeners has to date not been systematically investigated.
This paper reports on a quantitative study on the effect of grammatical and semantic co-text and extra-linguistic context on the intelligibility of accented speech to ELF listeners from various L1 backgrounds. Each listener was presented with target words spoken with an Austrian accent under four different conditions: (1) isolated words, (2) embedded in semantically neutral syntactic co-text, (3) embedded in semantically meaningful syntactic co-text and (4) embedded in syntactic co-text, with a certain extra-linguistic context in addition. Intelligibility was measured by the number of target words correctly transcribed by the listeners. The paper discusses the statistical effect of the various conditions on the ability of listeners to recognize the target words correctly. Analysis of results is ongoing, but early findings indicate that intelligibility increases proportionally to the amount of co-text and context provided. This research sheds light on the discursive and socio-pragmatic conditions under which certain pronunciation features are likely to cause problems for international listeners.
References:
Deterding, D. (2013). Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: OUP.
Osimk, R. (2009). “Decoding sounds: an experimental approach to intelligibility in ELF”. VIEWS 18(1), 64–89.
