The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit for Turkish Speakers of English

Abstract

This study is aimed at investigating the Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB) via native English and Turkish listeners’ transcriptions of Turkish talkers’ words with pronunciation errors in English. Speech samples collected from talkers with a Turkish L1 background (N=16) were presented to 33 L1 English and 33 L1 Turkish listeners via an instrument to be filled with the transcriptions of erroneous target words. Results supported matched ISIB for listeners as Turkish talkers were more intelligible to Turkish listeners in a considerably higher number of target words. Similarly, a higher number of target words were more intelligible to Turkish listeners with statistically significant differences. Most of these words had been labelled erroneous due to L1 transfer caused by orthographic interference, mispronunciations of English sounds that do not exist in Turkish, and loanwords found in similar forms in Turkish. Turkish listeners appeared to rely on such cues in Turkish talkers’ speech.

The Perception of the English Bilabial Glide Phoneme/ W/ Among Turkish Learners of L2 English: A Preliminary Study on Success and Contributing Factors

“…Based on the evidence, the major purpose of this paper is to see whether the perception of L2 English segments, which do not exist as a phoneme in the L1 inventory is ever possible. Previous studies have looked at L1 Turkish speakers' learning L2 English segments (e.g., Demirezen, 2005Demirezen, , 2007Demirezen, , 2008Hişmanoğlu, 2007;Hismanoglu, 2009;Kahraman, 2012Kahraman, , 2013Şimşek & Karal, 2014) and performance on their production (e.g., Bardakçı, 2015;Mahzoun & Han, 2019;Uzun, 2022b). The present study bears significance in contributing to existing research from a more cognitive-perceptual perspective by using a forced choice paper-based task.…”

Foreign Accent, Identity and Accent Discrimination: A Literature Review

“…Several studies explored linguistic factors that affect speech intelligibility. Some highlighted the importance of segmentals in this regard (e.g., Bent et al, 2007;Cunningham, 2009;Im & Levis, 2015;Jin & Liu, 2014;Levis & Barriuso, 2012;Uzun, 2022a), while others pointed to the importance of suprasegmentals like prosody and syllable structure (Anderson-Hsieh et al, 1992) and word stress (Field, 2005;Hahn, 2004, Lewis & Deterding, 2018Richards, 2016).…”