Intelligibility in Chinese English Spoken in Central China

Weijing Zhou; David Deterding; Francis Nolan

doi:10.1515/CJAL-2019-0027

Article

Intelligibility in Chinese English Spoken in Central China

Weijing Zhou
Weijing Zhou is Distinguished Professor of applied linguistics at Yangzhou University, China. Her research efforts have focused on applied linguistics, English phonetics, L2 English/ Mandarin phonetics, intelligibility of Chinese English, and Corpus-based phonetics on L2 English/ Mandarin.
, David Deterding
David Deterding is Professor of linguistics at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. His research has focused on acoustic description of speech, phonetics, description of Englishes in SE Asia, the Asian Corpus of English, and misunderstandings in international communication.
and Francis Nolan
Francis Nolan is Professor of phonetics at University of Cambridge, UK. His research efforts have focused on phonetic theory and description, practical phonetic skills (traditional and computer-aided), experimental phonetics, intonation and other aspects of prosody, basic phonology, speech identification, and the application of phonetics in forensics.

Published/Copyright: January 17, 2020

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From the journal Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics Volume 42 Issue 4

Abstract

It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English, and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level of intelligibility. However, the features that are needed in order to make oneself easily understood by listeners from elsewhere remain controversial. The current research focuses on thirteen five-minute recordings of conversations between young speakers of English in central China and an interviewer from Britain, in order to determine which features of their speech gave rise to misunderstandings. It was found that, in the 18 tokens of misunderstanding identified, 4 resulted from lexical semantics (22%), 3 from Chinese place names (17%), 3 from grammar (17%) , and 11 from pronunciation (61%) (with some tokens cross-classified). The most common phonological factors giving rise to loss of intelligibility were omission of syllables and simplification of word-initial consonant clusters.

Keywords: intelligibility; misunderstandings; Chinese English; pronunciation; consonant clusters

¹ Central China, in the paper, refers to the Jianghuai Region between the Yangtze River and the Huai River, which includes the central and northern part of Jiangsu Province, the central and southeasten part of Anhui Province, the southeastern part of Henan Province, as well as the mortheastern part of Hubei Province. Most people in this region belong to a subgroup of Han Chinese and speak a dialect of Chinese called Jianghuai Mandarin.

About the authors

Weijing Zhou

Weijing Zhou is Distinguished Professor of applied linguistics at Yangzhou University, China. Her research efforts have focused on applied linguistics, English phonetics, L2 English/ Mandarin phonetics, intelligibility of Chinese English, and Corpus-based phonetics on L2 English/ Mandarin.

David Deterding

David Deterding is Professor of linguistics at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. His research has focused on acoustic description of speech, phonetics, description of Englishes in SE Asia, the Asian Corpus of English, and misunderstandings in international communication.

Francis Nolan

Francis Nolan is Professor of phonetics at University of Cambridge, UK. His research efforts have focused on phonetic theory and description, practical phonetic skills (traditional and computer-aided), experimental phonetics, intonation and other aspects of prosody, basic phonology, speech identification, and the application of phonetics in forensics.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs (project GDT20173200030 & project G20190214022). The authors thank all the subjects for their participation and thank Yuting Lei for her help with the transcription.

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Published Online: 2020-01-17

Published in Print: 2019-11-26

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https://doi.org/10.1515/CJAL-2019-0027

Keywords for this article

intelligibility; misunderstandings; Chinese English; pronunciation; consonant clusters