PERCEPTION OF THE FOREIGN SPEECH
Abstract
The article is dedicated to the analysis of English speech of a non-native speaker from the position of the interlocutor. The main purpose of the study of foreign language speech and the study of motivation to master English as a foreign language is the speaker’s desire to be understood in an foreign communicative situation. The learner’s aim is to convey intentions and desires, and bring the message across. For the researches it has become paramount to highlight and study the peculiar features of accented speech of the representatives of different language groups. This trend contributed to the analysis of foreign speech from the point of view of the recipient, when the main condition for a successful communication is the desire to be understood by the native or non-native interlocutors. The article examines the criteria by which the recipient analyzes the speech of non-native speakers and makes judgments about the accent. The first criterion is the degree of accentedness, in other words the assessment of general speaking skills and abilities of a learner to communicate in a foreign language. The next criterion is the intelligibility of speech, which focuses on individual elements of speech, in particular, correctly pronounced words or phrases, correctly used grammatical constructions, or adequate phonological structure of an utterance. The last but not least is the comprehensibility of speech. This criterion determines the recipient’s ability to semantically decode the message as a whole, to realize the intentions and desires of the speaker. The article briefly describes the main parameters of these criteria, gives examples of experiments involving different categories of recipients and outlines the prospects for further research in this area.
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