French comprehension of English regional accents

Abstract

French comprehension of British regional varieties: what do response times tell us?The goal of this study is to contribute to the understanding of non-native listener’s perceptual comprehension of British regional accents. The read passage of the IViE corpus (Intonational Variation in English) was used for these experiments with a total of nine varieties from Cambridge, London (Jamaican), Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford (Punjabi), Cardiff, Newcastle, Belfast and Malahide. The subjects included 21 second-year French students majoring in English. The objective of the experiment was to measure the subject’s comprehension of regional varieties. The subjects were asked to write down orthographically what they heard and could listen to each sentence a maximum of four times. Are French people able to adapt to these regional accents and understand them? Does our adaptation mechanism only work for our own native language?The results of the comprehension task showed that the accents that were the most easily understood were Cardiff and Cambridge (the latter being the closest to Received Pronunciation, taught at University). Response times showed an unexpected pattern where they increased as the proportion of errors decreased.

Keywords

• reaction time
• comprehension
• perception
• non-natives
• regional accents