The Intelligibility of Native and Non-Native English Speech

Book excerpt: The purpose of this study is to measure the intelligibility of Cameroon English speech to British and American English speakers and vice versa, and to analyse the major causes of intelligibility failure when speakers of these varieties of English interact. Focus is on segmental and supra-segmental phonology. The study was motivated by a number of concerns: the trepidation nursed by some scholars that the emergence of non-native varieties around the world would cause English to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible varieties in the way Romance languages devolved from their Latin ancestors; the fact that previous studies on intelligibility were centred on the traditional approach which considers non-native varieties of English to be deficient, and not different from native varieties and the debate on the level of phonological analysis that is considered the greatest threat to intelligibility between native and non-native speakers. Five tests were designed for the study, namely Test I (connected speech), Test II (reading passage), Test III (phonemic contrast elicitation), Test IV (nucleus placement in words) and Test V (nucleus placement in sentences)