Flaps in Korean and American English are phonetically very similar, but the phoneme(s) of the flaps in the two languages are crucially different. This raises questions concerning how the realizations of flaps in the L1 phonology affect the perception ... Flaps in Korean and American English are phonetically very similar, but the phoneme(s) of the flaps in the two languages are crucially different. This raises questions concerning how the realizations of flaps in the L1 phonology affect the perception of the flaps, and especially how flapping in American English affects nonnative speakers’ interlanguage speech intelligibility. The first goal of the present research was to investigated how native language background influences the intelligibility of speech by non-native talkers for non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talker. The second goal of this study was to systematically examine the role of talkers’ and listeners’ L2 proficiency in mediating the ISIB-T and ISIB-L. The third goal of the present research was to study how flapping affects the interlanguage speech intelligibility in more detail. This study investigated how native language background and different levels of English phonological proficiency influenced the speech intelligibility of flaps in American English by native and non-native talkers for native and non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talkers. Native talkers of Chinese, Korean, and English were recorded reading simple English disyllabic words with flap sounds. Native listeners of English, Chinese, and Korean then performed a word recognition task with the recordings from the five talkers. The native speakers of Chinese and Korean were classfied into two different English proficiency groups. The results firstly showed that for the native English listeners, the native English talker was most intelligible. However, for the non-native listeners, speech from the non-native talkers from the same language background were more intelligible than from a native talker, giving rise to the “matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.” This interlanguage intelligibility benefit extended to the situation where the non-native talker and listeners came from different language backgrounds, giving rise to the “mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.” In particular, the results became obvious when the talkers and listeners were categorized according to their English proficiency. Second, the results revealed that the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for talkers (ISIB-T) emerged when the low proficiency Korean and Chinese listeners listened to speech from the low proficiency Korean and Chinese talkers and the high proficiency Chinese talker. Although the high proficiency listeners found native English speech to be more intelligible than nonnative-accented English for the English flaps, the low proficiency nonnative listeners identified English flaps produced by the low proficiency nonnative talkers significantly better than English flaps produced by the native English talkers. This might be due to the nonnative speakers’ tendency not to apply the phonological processes in L2 speech. This implies that when phonological rules do not occur and salient phonetic cues are retained, this facilitates comprehension for nonnative listeners, who also have not learned such speech processes. As for the interlanguage speech intelligibility for listeners (ISIB-L), the high proficiency Korean listeners perceived the nonnative English speeches by Korean and Chinese talkers with low proficiency of English, and Chinese talker with high proficiency of English considerably better than native English listeners. This implies that high proficiency learners have more extensive shared phonetic and phonological knowledge that facilitates communication between nonnatives, especially in perception of English flaps. Lastly, the study investigated the role of phonological rules in speech intelligibility by conducting production and perception tests with flap sounds. The results suggested that phonological rules had a significant influence on native and nonnative talkers and listeners’ speech intelligibility, showing improperly produced English flaps might impair intelligibility in communication between native and nonnative speakers. ，免费韩语论文，韩语论文 |
