Interview with Dr. Mary Grantham O’Brien: Looking at comprehensibility as a dynamic construct
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1995, Munro and Derwing changed the way second language (L2) speech is understood and researched. From that point on, applied linguists have adopted intelligibility (actual comprehension), comprehensibility (ease of understanding), and accentedness (degree of foreign accent), as global dimensions of L2 speech. Since the publication of Munro and Derwing's seminal work, a host of studies have investigated L2 speech learning from psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives in perception, production, longitudinal, and classroom-based designs. However, after more than two decades of carrying out research on global dimensions of L2 speech, changes in L2 pronunciation research methods began to arise (LEVIS, 2020; MUNRO; DERWING, 2020), and some researchers now conceive comprehensibility as dynamic rather than static. This means that listeners' perceptions of how easy it is to understand a speaker may vary on the basis of several variables. Dr. O'Brien, at the University of Calgary, together with colleagues across North America, is conducting trailblazing research on the malleability of comprehensibility. Their findings bring forward a new understanding of L2 speech; one that extrapolates traditional views of L2 pronunciation and expands the horizons of the field. In addition to investigating global dimensions of L2 speech as dynamic constructs, Dr. O'Brien has extensively looked into two other areas: The perception and production of prosodic cues (such as word stress, sentence stress, and intonation) to meaning, and
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".