The intelligibility and comprehensibility of French-accented English in an academic context

This study investigates the intelligibility and comprehensibility of French-accented speech in an academic context. L1 French and L1 English listeners heard speech samples in three different accent conditions: a marked French accent, an unmarked French accent and a Southern British English (SBE) accent. They were asked to perform two word recognition tasks, a speech comprehension task and provided subjective ratings of certainty, comprehensibility, cognitive load and accentedness. Results showed that for English listeners sharing the same first language (L1) had a facilitating effect, whereas varying the levels of French-accentedness had a detrimental effect. French listeners, however, did not find French-accented speech significantly more intelligible and comprehensible than SBE-accented speech. These findings deepen our knowledge of the relationship between intelligibility, comprehensibility, accentedness and cognitive load.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of Second Language Pronunciation

• Publication date

  2025-08-18

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1075/jslp.25010.oca
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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