Abstract
This research was conducted in order to investigate the effect of foreign accents of English on the degree of listening comprehension demonstrated by Japanese learners. To this end, we administered a test in which recordings of English passages made by a speaker of Received Pronunciation (RP) and another speaker whose native language is Hindi were played back to two groups of Japanese university students, with two varying levels of English ability, the "Upper-Level (UL) Group" (n=30) and the "Lower-Level (LL) Group" (n=30). The results indicated that (1) The LL Group demonstrated a low degree of listening comprehension of both the RP and Hindi accent speakers due to a lack of linguistic knowledge, whereas the UL Group demonstrated a gradual increase in comprehension over time through phonetic and linguistic mediation, particularly towards the accent of the Hindi speaker; and (2) Both the LL and UL Groups heavily favored a standard accent of English over the Hindi accent in terms of degree of comprehension. Our results found that when the listener has a relatively low proficiency in English, a mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility disadvantage can be produced.
