The Intelligibility of English Speech to Non-Native English Speakers

A series of experiments were carried out on groups of students at PCL to investigate their performance on two tests of speech intelligibility: the single word test of Fry and the sentence test (AIS) of the author. The performance on these tests of the non-native English speaking (nnE) students was significantly below that of their native English speaking counterparts. It was shown that the nnE groups had a much better understanding of written words than they had of spoken words.