抄録
This case study investigated the issue of how accented English pronunciation influences the listening comprehension of non-native listeners with different native language backgrounds.Two different spoken texts were recorded and prepared before the study: one read by a native speaker of Received Pronunciation (RP) and the other read by a native speaker of Japanese. These two spoken texts were then given to 7 native speakers of Chinese as a listening comprehension task. The influence of two different types of English pronunciation was then measured and evaluated based on the performance results of the listening comprehension task. The results showed that the Chinese participants demonstrated a significantly lower degree of listening comprehension performance when listening to the text read by the Japanese speaker of English (JSE) than the one read by the RP speaker of English. The results suggest that the accented English pronunciation produced by the JSE caused an intelligibility detriment effect on the listening comprehension performance of the Chinese participants. These results partially explain communication breakdowns which can occur in the context of international English language communication due to the mismatch of English pronunciation among non-native speakers of English with different types of accented English pronunciation.
