Phonological Awareness and Speech Comprehensibility: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This study examined whether differences in phonological awareness were related to differences in speech comprehensibility. Seventeen adults who learned English as a foreign language (EFL) in academic settings completed 14 tests of phonological awareness that measured their explicit knowledge of English phonological structures, and three tests of phonological short term memory. The same participants also read aloud a passage and narrated picture stories. These tasks were used by 12 native speakers of English to rate the EFL speakers' comprehensibility on a 9-point scale. There was a strong positive correlation between composite phonological awareness scores and rated comprehensibility and between composite phonological awareness scores and phonological short term memory. The correlation between rated comprehensibility and phonological short term memory was not significant. A simple linear regression analysis showed that approximately 19% of the variance in rated comprehensibility scores was accounted for by composite phonological awareness scores. The study offers support to the view that phonological awareness is related to differences in speech comprehensibility and the results suggest that form-focused instruction in phonology may contribute to the comprehensibility of EFL speakers.

Brazilian Efl Learners’ Awareness About L2 Phones: Is Mall Pronounced as ‘Mal’?

“…shoemaker (2014) found a relation between L1 French English majors' awareness about the segmental phonology of the L2 and the amount of language exposure, so that 3 rd year students performed better than 1 st year students. Nevertheless, other studies have failed to find a relation between language experience and use and awareness about L2 phonology (KIVIsTö-DE sOuza, 2015;KENNEDY, 2012;VENKaTaGIRI & LEVIs, 2007). Therefore, the developmental paths, the order and the speed of acquisition of L2 phonological awareness require further research.…”

Lexical and sublexical orthographic processing: An ERP study with skilled and dyslexic adult readers

“…In addition to the Performance Scale subtests, two subtests (Vocabulary and Digit Span) of the WAIS-III Verbal Scale were also performed. Finally, phonological processing was assessed with a Phoneme deletion and Spoonerism task (Francisco & Faísca, 2012), adapted from the ones developed by Venkatagiri and Levis (2007), and a Rapid automatized naming task with letters and digits (Phonological Assessment Battery; Alves, Branco, Pontes, & Castro, 2007). As can be seen in Table 1 non-verbal IQ did not differentiate the groups, but the mean performance of the dyslexics was reliably lower than that of the controls for the digit span subtest, and for all reading and phonological processing tasks.…”

Student Teachers’ Cognition about L2 Pronunciation Instruction: A Case Study

“…In light of the context in which this research is situated (pronunciation teacher preparation), student teachers' phonological awareness (PA) signifies TLA. PA is defined in this research as an L2 teacher's intuition, insight and understanding of how phonology works, and is therefore seen as a key element in pronunciation instruction (Venkatagiri & Levis, 2007).…”