Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityPhonetic correlates of unintelligibility in VietnameseaccentedEnglishUna CunninghamSchool of Arts and Media, Dalarna University, FalunAbstractVietnamese speakers of English are often ableto communicate much more efficiently in writingthan in speaking. Many have quite highproficiency levels, with full command of advancedvocabulary and complex syntax, yetthey have great difficulty making themselvesunderstood when speaking English to both nativeand non-native speakers. This paper exploresthe phonetic events associated withbreakdowns in intelligibility, and looks at compensatorymechanisms which are used.IntelligibilityThe scientific study of intelligibility has passedthrough a number of phases. Two strands thathave shifted in their relative prominence are thematter of to whom non-native speakers are tobe intelligible. In one strand the emphasis is onthe intelligibility of non-native speakers to nativeEnglish-speaking listeners (Flege, Munro etal. 1995; Munro and Derwing 1995; Tajima,Port et al. 1997). This was the context in whichEnglish was taught and learned – the majorityof these studies have been carried out in whatare known as inner circle countries, which, inturn, reflects the anglocentricism which hascharacterised much of linguistics. The otherstrand focuses on the position of English as alanguage of international communication,where intelligibility is a two-way affair betweena native or non-native English-speaking speakerand a native or non-native English-speakinglistener (Irvine 1977; Flege, MacKay et al.1999; Kirkpatrick, Deterding et al. 2008; Rooy2009).The current study is a part of a larger studyof how native speakers of American English,Swedish, Vietnamese, Urdu and Ibo are perceivedby listeners from these and other languagebackgrounds. Vietnamese-accentedspeech in English has been informally observedto be notably unintelligible for native Englishspeakinglisteners and even for Vietnamese listenersthere is great difficulty in choosingwhich of four words has been uttered (Cunningham2009).There are a number of possible ways inwhich intelligibility can be measured. Listenerscan be asked to transcribe what they hear or tochoose from a number of alternatives. Stimulivary from spontaneous speech through texts tosentences to wordlists. Sentences with varyingdegrees of semantic meaning are often used(Kirkpatrick, Deterding et al. 2008) to controlfor the effect of contextual information on intelligibility.Few intelligibility studies appear to beconcerned with the stimulus material. The questionof what makes an utterance unintelligible isnot addressed in these studies. The current paperis an effort to come some way to examiningthis issue.Learning English in VietnamThe pronunciation of English presents severechallenges to Vietnamese-speaking learners.Not only is the sound system of Vietnamesevery different from that of English, but there arealso extremely limited opportunities for hearingand speaking English in Vietnam. In addition,there are limited resources available to teachersof English in Vietnam so teachers are likely topass on their own English pronunciation to theirstudents.University students of English are introducedto native-speaker models of English pronunciation,notably Southern educated British,but they do not often have the opportunity tospeak with non-Vietnamese speakers of English.Most studies of Vietnamese accents inEnglish have been based in countries whereEnglish is a community language, such as theU.S. (Tang 2007) or Australia (Nguyen 1970;In-gram and Nguyen 2007). This study is thusunusual in considering the English pronunciationof learners who live in Vietnam. Thespeech material presented here was produced bymembers of a group of female students fromHanoi.Vietnamese accents of EnglishThe most striking feature of VietnameseaccentedEnglish is the elision of consonants, inparticular in the syllable coda. This can obvi-108