A Comparative Study on the Perception of Accents and Language Comprehension of Chinese English Learners by Native English and Chinese Speakers

Abstract

This study investigates how English native speakers and Chinese native speakers perceive the accent and comprehend the speech of Chinese English learners. While extensive research has examined the intelligibility of foreign-accented English, little attention has been paid to the comparative evaluation of accented speech by interlocutors from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Building on the framework of interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB), this research aims to determine whether Chinese listeners gain advantages from shared phonological features with Chinese English learners and whether English listeners maintain superior overall comprehension despite unfamiliar accent patterns. The experiment recruited six Chinese learners of English as talkers and twenty listeners, including ten native English speakers and ten native Chinese speakers. Materials consisted of lexical items and sentence comprehension tasks containing typical features of Chinese-accented English such as /r/-/l/ confusion, final consonant deletion, and tone interference. Pre-test, exposure, and post-test procedures were used to assess accent perception, speech intelligibility, and short-term adaptation. Results suggest that Chinese listeners benefit from shared L1 phonological transfer in specific contexts, such as final consonant deletion, whereas English listeners outperform Chinese listeners in overall intelligibility and sentence comprehension. Short-term exposure was found to facilitate perceptual adaptation for both groups, but generalization to new talkers remained limited. The findings highlight the complex interplay between listener background, accent familiarity, and adaptation in shaping speech perception. They also provide implications for English language pedagogy in China and for cross-cultural communication between Chinese and English speakers.