Due to conflicting findings on the relevance and influence of the shared L1 benefit on listeners’ comprehension, the present study had the primary goal of investigating the extent to which shared L1 benefit and accent familiarity explain listeners’ ratings of comprehensibility and accentedness. It also aimed to explore the role of listener characteristics in predicting their comprehensibility judgments. Listener participants included 140 international students from four different L1 backgrounds (i.e., Mandarin, Akan, Hindi, and Spanish). A linear mixed effects model revealed that speech samples with a shared L1 received lower comprehensibility scores, indicating that they were perceived as easier to understand. They were also rated as less accented compared to non-shared L1 samples. No interaction effects were observed between shared L1 and accent familiarity in predicting comprehensibility and accentedness. Interestingly, a significant random effect of speakers’ L1 background was observed, corroborating the notion that the influence of shared L1 on listeners’ understanding and perception is context dependent. Additionally, listeners’ perception of nativelikeness was the strongest predictor of their comprehensibility ratings, while linguistic exposure and gender predicted comprehensibility only moderately. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.
Michelle Richter (Fri,) studied this question.