Stress and intonation and the intelligibility of South African black English 1

 1. Studies of the intelligibility of errorful English spoken by second- or foreign-language users have often involved little more than the recognition of linguistic form, for example, Lane's (1963) experiment in which subjects were asked to recognise English monosyllables spoken by three different foreign speakers. More recently there has been a concern for the communicative effect of error, and error gravity measured against the consequences of error on the comprehensibility of contextualised discourse (e.g. Johansson 1978). We propose that a distinction be made between intelligibility and comprehensibility on this basis.