The shared-L1 benefit: A comparison of comprehensibility by Chinese raters judging Chinese- and Japanese-accented speech
発表概要
The purpose of this study is to explore the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit as suggested by Bent and Bradlow (2003). According to this concept, second language speech is perceived as more intelligible for a listener if the speaker and the listener share their first language. To investigate the hypothesis, four Chinese learners of English listened to ninety spontaneous speech samples, obtained from 45 Japanese and 45 Chinese learners of English, and evaluated the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of the speech tokens on 9-point scale (where 1 = easy to understand, 9 = difficult to understand). A Wilcoxon signed rank test showed that the Chinese listeners assigned significantly more lenient (easier-to-understand) judgments on Chinese speakers (Mean = 3.9, SD = 1.3, Median = 3.5) than Japanese ones (Mean = 4.9, SD = 1.6, Median = 5.3) (V = 772.5, p < .001). Further discussion will be made based on the results.