Listeners’ impressionistic judgments on accentedness and comprehensibility of second language learners’ spontaneous speech
The current dissertation is a perceptual rating study on speech samples produced in English by speakers of Chilean Spanish. This investigation is focused on whether nativeness and prior linguistic knowledge produce differences in perception, reflected in the scores assigned to two linguistic phenome...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2017 |
| País: | Chile |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.anid.cl:10533/237789 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/10533/237789 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Humanidades Lenguage y Literatura Lingüística |
| Sumario: | The current dissertation is a perceptual rating study on speech samples produced in English by speakers of Chilean Spanish. This investigation is focused on whether nativeness and prior linguistic knowledge produce differences in perception, reflected in the scores assigned to two linguistic phenomena identified as comprehensibility, “the ease of understanding” (Saito et al., 2016, p.597), and accentedness, “raters’ perception of the degree to which L2 speech is influenced by [someone’s] native language” (Saito, Trofimovich and Isaacs, 2016, p.224). These two variables were rated by four groups of subjects, which were composed of English listeners with and without prior linguistic knowledge and Chilean-Spanish listeners with and without prior linguistic knowledge. These four groups assigned scores from 1 to 9 to both variables, where 1 stood for very difficult to understand (comprehensibility) and no foreign accent (accentedness), and 9 stood for very easy to understand (comprehensibility) and very strong foreign accent (accentedness). The listeners also rated the importance some linguistic components had on the assessment of accentedness and comprehensibility when listening to ten speech samples. The linguistic factors chosen for these investigation were segments, word stress, fluency, intonation, rhythm, grammar and vocabulary. These results contribute to a better understanding of which factors are important to focus on when teaching English as a second language in a context of native speakers of (Chilean) Spanish. |
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