Revisiting the moderating effect of speaker proficiency on the relationships among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in L2 Spanish (original) (raw)
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Native speech is directed towards native listeners, not designed for comprehension and analysis by language learners. Speed of delivery, or economy of effort, produces a speech signal to which the native listener can assign the correct words. There are no discrete words in the speech signal itself therefore there is often a linguistic barrier in dealing with the local spoken language. The creation, development and application of the Dynamic Spanish Speech Corpus (DSSC) facilitated an empirically-based appreciation of speaking speed and prosody as obstacles to intelligibility for learners of Spanish. “Duologues”, natural, relaxed dialogues recorded in such a manner that each interlocutor’s performance can be studied in isolation, thus avoiding problems normally caused by cross-talk and backchannelling, made possible the identification of the key phonetic features of informal native-native dialogue, and ultimately, the creation of high quality assets/ research data based on natural (unscripted) dialogues recorded at industry audio standards. These assets were used in this study, which involved documenting productive and receptive intelligibility problems when L2 users are exposed to the Spanish speech of native speakers. The aim was to observe where intelligibility problems occur and to determine the reasons for this, based on effects of the first language of the subjects, and other criteria, such as number of years learning/using Spanish, previous exposure to spoken Spanish and gender. This was achieved by playing recorded extracts/ snippets from the DSSC to which a time-scaling tool was applied.
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‘Intelligibility’ is an emergent phenomenon, which depends not only on the speaker, but also on the listener and on their interaction. In this chapter, we discuss some segmental and suprasegmental aspects that may hinder intelligibility in the L2 English produced by Hindi learners when interacting with an L1-Spanish speaker of English. Given this goal, we expand on the analysis carried out by Luchini and Kennedy (2013), in order to analyze three more communication excerpts among two Indian speakers and one Argentinean (the first author of this study). The discussion of these transcripts reinforces not only that both segmental and suprasegmental are important for speech intelligibility, but it also provides additional information on what phonetic-phonological aspects might play a role in the shared intelligibility between L1 Hindi and Spanish speakers. On the grounds of the status of these phonological aspects, and bearing in mind this shared role in the interaction of both speakers and listeners, some suggestions for the teaching of English as a global language are provided.