Intelligibility of English L2: The effects of lack of vowel reduction and incorrect word stress placement in the speech of French and Italian learners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a debate in the literature on whether the intelligibility of English second language (L2) speech is more affected, among other things, by incorrect vowel reduction or by incorrect word stress placement. Identifying which features interfere most with intelligibility will assist in selecting what to prioritize in teaching pronunciation. The focus of this pilot study was to determine how incorrect vowel reduction or incorrect word stress placement, alone or in combination, impacts the intelligibility of Canadian French (CF) and Italian (I) L2 English. A close shadowing test was administered in which native (L1) English speaker/listeners responded to CF‐ and I‐accented English words containing naturally occurring word stress and vowel reduction errors in various combinations. Correct word identification and reaction time results confirm that both incorrect stress and vowel reduction interfere with L2 intelligibility. Results also suggest that even though misplaced word stress is damaging to intelligibility, incorrect vowel reduction is more detrimental.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".