Resumen de Comparing native speakers’ intelligibility and acceptability judgments of japanese efl learners
Intelligibility and acceptability ultimately lies with listener perceptions and judgments. Rubrecht (2009) showed that listener dialect influences these perceptions and judgments. Because listeners use segmental cues such as /ɹ/ and /l/ to determine strength of accent (e.g., Riney, Takagi & Inutsuka, 2005), further research (Rubrecht, 2012) examining how judges (raters) differ in their perceptions of Japanese EFL speakers’ word-level phonemic productions indicated statistical significance between the judges of /ɹ/ and /l/ in multiple word positions, thereby legitimizing questions regarding the potential lack of pronunciation instruction and evaluation standards across educators and judges. In order to determine if pronunciation training influences statistical significance, further research (i.e., the current research) found statistically significant instances reduced by almost half, indicating that pronunciation training can improve the intelligibility and acceptability of /ɹ/ and /l/ of native Japanese speakers for judges who do not emphasize such production in all positions in their dialects.
