ABSTRACT
Preliminary Remarks on the Instrumental Assessment of Intelligibility - is subdivided into three sections. The first examines the thorny issue of intelligibility from the standpoints of sociolinguistics and L2 pronunciation research. It also elaborates on the aforementioned instrumental methodology. The second installment introduces the Auditory-Perceptual Theory and discusses the three stages involved in acoustic signal processing. The explanations combine pictures and prose in order to illustrate the transduction mechanisms, starting from when speech signals leave the mouth, undergo transformations in the hearer’s ears, until they arrive in the Central Auditory Nervous System. The third section uses Kachru’s Three-Circle Model of world Englishes to explain who L2 speakers of English are. They are defined as speakers from Expanding Circle countries where English is acquired only as an academic subject. They are the focus of this book because their English is often the least intelligible. The L2 speakers whose speech samples are described are 10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 6 Somali, 11 Slavic, and 10 Spanish. These 67 speakers are the experimental group. The acoustic phonetic measurements of the segments and suprasegments that they produce are compared and contrasted with those produced by 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who are the control group. The findings discussed in the rest of the book are based on more than 12,000 measured tokens.
