Open AccessDutch listeners’ responses to Dutch, British and American English accents in three contexts.
Author(s) -
Warda Nejjari,
Marinel Gerritsen,
R.W.N.M. van Hout,
Brigitte Planken
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
dutch journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.205
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 2211-7253
pISSN - 2211-7245
DOI - 10.51751/dujal9365
Subject(s) - dynamism , affect (linguistics) , pitch accent , linguistics , psychology , intelligibility (philosophy) , stress (linguistics) , context (archaeology) , world englishes , american english , prosody , history , communication , philosophy , physics , epistemology , archaeology , quantum mechanics
The aim of this study was to assess Dutch listeners’ responses to native-accented Englishes compared with Dutch-accented English in terms of speech understandability and speech evaluations in three professional communication contexts. In a matched-guise experiment Dutch listeners (N=392) responded to a Dutch English, a standard British and American accent in terms of speech understandability (intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability) and speaker evaluations (status, affect, dynamism). Dutch listeners evaluated these accents in three communication contexts: Lecture, Audio Tour, Job Pitch. Only context affected speech understandability: comprehensibility and interpretability were higher for the Lecture compared to the Audio Tour and the Job Pitch. Accent only negatively affected status evaluations for Dutch-accented English. Context only evoked more affect in the Audio Tour and the Lecture than in the Job Pitch. Our main conclusion is that Dutch-accented English negatively impacts status, but not understanding, affect and dynamism. Context impacts understanding and affect.