Effects of listener factors and stimulus properties on the intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of L2 speech

The intelligibility, comprehensibility and foreign accentedness of native and Polish-accented English sentences were evaluated by six Polish, six Spanish and six English speakers. The nonnative data were also analyzed for segmental and word stress errors. Results indicated that the three measures were partially independent of one another, supporting earlier findings that accented speech can be intelligible and comprehensible. An interlanguage speech intelligibility detriment was observed for Spanish listeners, but no clear evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit was found, as nonnative listeners never outperformed native listeners. The number of segmental errors, rather than lexical stress errors, was found to correlate with comprehensibility and accentedness ratings of nonnative speech, but not with intelligibility scores. In general, the results point to a greater effect of stimulus properties than of listeners’ L1s in the perception of nonnative speech.