LINGUIST List 11.839

Wed Apr 12 2000

Qs: Comprehension/L2 Speakers, Phonetics/Igbo/Ijo

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Mark_Mandel, comprehension *of* L2 speakers
2. Sylvia Moosm�ller, Igbo, Ijo

In parallel to the recent question about L2 comprehension in noise, is there any
info on comprehension in noise of L2 speech? In particular, I would expect that
native speakers of the same L1 as the person speaking (assuming that they are
all fluent in the L2) might comprehend better than either native speakers of the
L2 or native speakers of other L1s (who don't know the speaker's L1).

That looks rather complicated, so let me give a concrete example. Take a native
speaker of Russian who is fluent in English as L2, but who still has an accent.
Record this person speaking English in noise, or add noise to a clean recording.
Play the noisy recording for three categories of listener:
 1. Native English-speakers
 2. Native Russian-speakers who are fluent in English as L2
 3. Native speakers of other languages who are fluent in English as L2

The hypothesis here is twofold:
 a. that group 2's comprehension will be better than group 1's
 b. that group 2's comprehension will be better than group 3's

I would expect the comparison between groups 1 and 3 to be subject to the
similarity of the accents of the group 3 listeners to the accent of the speaker,
vis-a-vis their similarity to native English speech. E.g., a Ukrainian-speaking
listener might do better than group 1, but a Hindi-speaking listener worse.

I am not doing research in this area, but in the context of L2 comprehension it
occurred to me as a question that someone might want to look into.

 Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist and Manager of Acoustic Data
 Mark_Mandeldragonsys.com : Dragon Systems, Inc.
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
 (speaking for myself)

I am looking for phonological and phonetic descriptions of Igbo and Ijo
(=Ijaw). Could anybody possibly give me some references?

Thanks in advance,

Sylvia Moosm�ller
moosmkfs.oeaw.ac.at