English Phonological Intelligibility : A Phono - Numerical Measure

To assess the link between accent and intelligibility, previous research has heavily relied on human responses, demonstrating that human assessment is influenced by such subjective factors as linguistic proficiency (Pihko, 1997), familiarity (Smith, 1992), age (Burda, 2000), reactions to speakers’ kinetic cues (Bara, 1992; Rubin, 1992), and dialectal differences (Smith & Bisazza, 1982). In particular, language attitude studies have alerted us that nonstandard speakers are regularly regarded not only as suffering a pathological condition (Regional Rehabilitation Hospital, cited in Weinberger, 2000), but also as sounding less ‘pleasant’ and ‘correct’ than their standard counterparts (Scales et at., 2006). To separate these affective-attitudinal factors from research on accent-intelligibility correlation, this paper elaborates a phono-numerical measure on the grounds of linguistic evidence. Although listener judgments provide crucial clues for understanding how accent affects intelligibility, this measure aims to compare sound differences and explore their effect on phonological intelligibility as the linguistic index of perceptual intelligibility.