FREQUENCY EFFECTS ON THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF ENGLISH WORDS WITH HIGH FRONT VOWELS

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to examine to what extent intelligibility scores, as measured through word transcription, correlate with lexical frequency and with listeners’ familiarity with the target words. 32 listeners from different language backgrounds had to orthographically transcribe ten missing target-words (all CVC words, five with the tense high front vowel and five with its lax counterpart), which were produced by Brazilian Portuguese learners of English. In order to assess word frequency, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (DAVIES, 2013) was used. Moreover, listeners’ familiarity with the target lexical items was assessed using a four-point rating scale. Spearman correlations revealed significant, and moderate to strong relationships between intelligibility, frequency and familiarity, showing that the more frequent the lexical item, the more intelligible it was according to listeners’ performance; the more familiar listeners were to a certain lexical item, the more intelligible it was. Furthermore, the semantic and syntactic cotext of the sentences containing the target words influenced listeners’ performance to a certain extent, depending both on the listeners’ L2 proficiency level, the acoustic features of the target words, and lexical frequency