Intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of English spoken by Finns

This project explores how listeners perceive English spoken by Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking Finns. Previous research has obtained knowledge about the typical accentedness features of Finns’ English, but very little is known about how listeners receive them when realised in speech.

Project duration

1.1.2018 - 21.12.2021

Core fields of research

Languages, culture and society

Learning, teaching and interaction

Research areas

Learning and interaction

Department

Department of Language and Communication Studies

Co-operation

Project FOKUS (2015–2019, Ģ��ֱ��), Finnish National Agency for Education, Finnish Education Evaluation Centre

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Funding

Research Council of Finland

Project description

Finland offers a unique context for exploring questions of intelligibility (i.e., actual understanding), comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (strength of foreign accent) with its two national languages, both previously unexplored in this line of research. In addition, this project considers the speakers’ overall oral proficiency as a background variable, which bridges comprehensibility and accentedness research to the field of language assessment.

Aims

The project aims to shed new light on

how comprehensible and foreign accented is English spoken by Finns, as rated by English speaking listeners and Finns themselves,
possible differences in the comprehensibility and accentedness between L1 Finnish and L1 Finland-Swedish learners of English,
whether Finns experience a shared language effect when ratings their peers’ English for comprehensibility and accentedness,
which speech features are linked with second language comprehensibility and accentedness,
the relationship between L2 proficiency and comprehensibility/accentedness, and
whether the typical accentedness features of Finns’ English can likely compromise intelligibility.

Key findings

At proficiency levels B1 and B2, L1 Swedish speakers are perceived more comprehensible and less accented than L1 Finnish speakers. This suggests that the two speaker groups differ as for their English, and that speakers with equal CEFR proficiency can still vary as for comprehensibility and strength of foreign accent.
Overall, the association between proficiency and comprehensibility/accentedness was found weak. The weak link is understandable as for proficiency and accentedness, because a foreign accent should not lower the speaker’s proficiency unless the accent makes the speaker difficult to understand. However, the finding suggests that language assessment does not fully consider ease of understanding and related speech features.

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