title: The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit as Bias Toward Native-Language Phonology.
abstract: Two hypotheses have been advanced in the recent literature with respect to the so-called Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB): a nonnative speaker will be better understood by a another nonnative listener than a native speaker of the target language will be (a) only when the nonnatives share the same native language (matched interlanguage) or (b) even when the nonnatives have different mother tongues (non-matched interlanguage). Based on a survey of published experimental materials, the present article will demonstrate that both the restricted (a) and the generalized (b) hypotheses are false when the ISIB effect is evaluated in terms of absolute intelligibility scores. We will then propose a simple way to compute a relative measure for the ISIB (R-ISIB), which we claim is a more insightful way of evaluating the interlanguage benefit, and test the hypotheses in relative (R-ISIB) terms on the same literature data. We then find that our R-ISIB measure only supports the more restricted hypothesis (a) while rejecting the more general hypothesis (b). This finding shows that the native language shared by the interactants biases the listener toward interpreting sounds in terms of the phonology of the shared mother tongue.
authors.affiliation: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, The Netherlands; Department of English, Shenzhen University, China.
authors.forename: Hongyan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, The Netherlands; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, The Netherlands; Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary.
authors.forename: Vincent J
authors.initials: VJ
authors.lastname: van Heuven
keywords: Nonnative speech perception; interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit; linear modeling; matched interlanguage; non-matched interlanguage