Comprehensibility and Accentedness in Second Language Pronunciation

The recent ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics which rejects dominant monolingual ideologies and ‘the idealized native speaker,’ while prioritizing multilingual competencies and repertoires is in lockstep with broader discussions in the Arts and Humanities focused on social justice and celebrating diversity. Within the field of second language pronunciation, this shift means focusing on goals of intelligibility and comprehensibility rather than accent elimination. A critical line of inquiry has become to differentiate between speech features impeded communication from those that, while potentially salient, do not. This proposed project directly contributes to area by examining how listener perceptions of pronunciation impact their evaluations of second language speech. Recent studies (Huensch & Nagle, 2020, 2021) have suggested that having listeners transcribe learner speech might act as an awareness-raising tool because when they write down what they hear, they can differentiate speech that is difficult to understand from that which is merely accented. The proposed study will test this by collecting listener ratings of learner speech via Amazon Mechanical Turk and comparing it to previously collected ratings of the same speech samples which were also transcribed. The findings have the potential to provide implications for designing training modules to reduce accent discrimination