L2 Accent and Intelligibility by Chinese L2 Speakers of English

Two accent perception experiments revealed that Mandarin-speaking advanced learners of English may give harsh accent evaluations on their fellow learners even when they may perfectly understand the content of speech. Following Evans and Iverson (2007), Experiment 1 harvested the comprehensibility and accentedness ratings as well as intelligibility scores as they heard read paragraphs of high, moderate and low Mandarin as well as Cantonese accents. Experiment 2 was a word-in-sentence accent detection experiment with a series of force-choice word recognition tests for intelligibility and Likert scale questions for accentedness ratings. The findings showed a marked high level of perceived L2 accentedness on all accent levels disregarding good intelligibility, especially for the high and moderate accent levels in Experiment 1 and several consonant and vowel conditions in Experiment 2. Surprisingly, some participants gave lower accentedness ratings to L2-accented excerpts than to native speakers'. Findings shed light on what phonemes are learnable and should be prioritized in pronunciation teaching based on the disparity between intelligibility and accentedness.