THE EFFECT OF TASK TYPE ON NATIVE SPEAKER JUDGMENTS OF L2 ACCENTED SPEECH

摘要

Research investigating adult second language (L2) accent often relies on human listeners to assess speech. While human judgments can measure intelligibility in absolute terms, they might be less precise for measuring fine-grained speaker-dependent variables. For example, there appears to be a relationship between lexical frequency [1] and familiarity [2], and L2 pronunciation accuracy. Some argue that these lexical effects do not reflect real differences in the speakers' articulation of more vs. less frequent words. Rather, judges may perceive the more frequent or familiar words to be more intelligible, because they are more frequent or familiar to the judges themselves [3]. We test this claim by measuring the effect of lexical familiarity on the intelligibility of L2 vowel productions judged in words, and as isolated vowels extracted from those words, thereby masking lexical context.