I have this project for school with my students and we are trying to create a list of the non-native accents in English that are the most difficult to understand (by natives or non natives). In other words, I'm trying to establish if it is English spoken in France, Poland, or Liberia etc. Also, what are the deviant phonological features that make comprehension more difficult? (other than word stress on the wrong syllable). If anyone has thoughts or knows a study regarding these topics, I would be very glad to hear about it. Thanks for your help!
Assuming 'difficult' means 'different' and that there is uniform L1 transfer from any ground language (i.e. French bring as much French into their English as Poles bring Polish and so on), you could use 'linguistic distance' metrics.
I don't know about 'most difficult' (as in overall among all EFL speaking communities). It may be a more convenient design option to just (pre)select certain ones (especially ones you can get actual data for; as in say a spoken corpus) and study how they differ. I don't get how it would help your students, but if you then want to go ahead and rank them, you could.
Also, I don't know if you can lump together perceptions of difficulty in comprehension by different EFL speaking communities. For example, a Portuguese 'accent' would be much easier for a Spanish EFL speaker than a Japanese one. I'd say, stick to one community's perceptions instead.
Sounds to me like you’re focused on the perceptions of a mainstream audience (English is their L1) when hear in the accent of EFL speakers. Of course, accents of English are not one thing: someone who has spoken English for a long time will have a more “subtle” accent, whereas someone who has just begun to learn English will have a lot more trouble being understood, in large part because of interference from their L1. As a voice teacher for actors who teaches English speakers to perform accents, in many ways a “foreign” accent that is further away from English is easier to learn than a subtle accent that is fairly close to their own accent due to interference.
If you did a little study with your students where you gathered samples of accents (for example, from IDEA https://www.dialectsarchive.com or the Speech Accent Archive at GMU http://accent.gmu.edu//index.php ) and had participants rate the samples from most to least intelligible within a language group, and then have a discussion with them around why they ranked them as they did. To what degree might bias toward one language or cultural group affect their perception?
Related to the above somewhat...is how much experience do you have listening to accents.
If you grow up in an environment where you are immersed in a multi-lingual or multidialectal environment, your ear will become more easily tuned to a new accent, especially if it's related to one you already know. So you would be able to hear "through" accents more easily...The exception is
if it's an accent that is very remote from those you already know...Many years ago, for me, that was Japanese accented English, which was totally new to me at the time, and nothing like all the other accents and dialects I was very familiar with (about 10 at the time).
Very interesting project. Here is a nice study that could be relevant for you:
Bent, T., & Atagi, E. (2017). Perception of nonnative-accented sentences by 5-to 8-year-olds and adults: The role of phonological processing skills. Language and Speech, 60(1), 110-122.
Good luck with your work.
Best, Isabel
I can not comment on the countries, but I have a PhD in speech-language pathology and have worked with ESL students on their accents and grammatical/morphological errors. The most common problems I see with phonetic errors are b/v confusion and w/v confusion, as well as vowel errors (which significantly affect intelligibility). Also, I see errors with the "th" interdental sound. Grammatical errors include articles and prepositions and morphological errors most often involve inappropriate verb tense endings.
Julie all of what you are saying is absolutely true. However, the specifics are highly language dependent I think...e.g. article errors are likely to occur in languages that have articles as prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. Phonetic errors will depend on the degree of overlap. I would also think that if you have b/v errors, you'll either have voicing errors all over the place or at least in the "stop" class as a whole...
Linguistically,we do not have an accent that is much knottier than others,nor more prestigous,but it is a matter that is mainly accompained with it spread and usage by the speakers.
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