The Effects of Perceived Ethnicity and Prosodic Accuracy on Intelligibility,Comprehensibility,and Accentedness in L2 Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Separate traditions of research have examined the impact of linguistic factors and social factors on the intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of second language (L2) speech, but studies that simultaneously investigate social and linguistic factors are rarely conducted on L2 languages other than English and outside of Western social and cultural environments. This study explores the effects of utterance-level prosody and speaker ethnicity on perception of L2 Mandarin Chinese speech. First language (L1) Mandarin listeners (n = 292) were asked to select the correct transcriptions of each of six sentences spoken by two male L2 Mandarin speakers who differed in their prosodic accuracy. While listening to each set of sentences, a picture of an Asian face or a White face was displayed on the listener’s screen. Results indicate that participants were significantly more likely to select the correct transcription of each sentence both when they heard the speaker with high prosodic accuracy and when they believed that the speaker was ethnically Chinese. Listeners also rated speakers’ comprehensibility, accentedness, and perceived personal characteristics; listeners rated a speaker with higher prosodic accuracy or believed to be ethnically Chinese as more comprehensible, less accented, and higher on perceived personal characteristics. This study demonstrates that a link between linguistic and social factors exists in processing L2 speech, even outside of the social, cultural, and linguistic environments typically used as a setting for investigation of L2 speech perception, and it explores implications for L2 Mandarin pronunciation teaching.