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It is difficult to have empirical evidence for a subjective thing like the understandability of someone's accent.
by Fuzzwah 13y ago
It is difficult to have empirical evidence for a subjective thing like the understandability of someone's accent.
- dllthomas 13y agoNo, it really isn't. Just record something they say, and have a randomly selected group try to transcribe it. Count errors and measure speed.
- asolove 13y agoWhat? Listening comprehension is absolutely measurable. Take the same passage, have subjects in different groups listen to it as read by various speakers, and test them on how much of the content (and its implications) they understood. Of course there is an extreme where the passage isn't understandable at all. But what we're talking about is the point where the words are comprehensible, but the mental effort to decode them is quite high. That effort pushes out the higher-level thoughts that would otherwise be going along with the surface-level listening. So listeners will know what was said, but have thought and abstracted less about it. This kind of thing is commonly done in linguistics research when trying to, for example, differentiate dialects.
- Fuzzwah 13y agoYes, but in PG's example it is his list and his comprehension we're talking about.
- tarre 13y agoYou should not forget, that the result depends heavily also on the listener. Probably the hardest to understand English I have ever heard has been spoken by two native Englishmen who I met last year at a hostel in Spain. Similarly in my opinion the most clear English is spoken in Germany and the Nordic countries. It's just a matter of what you are used to.