Preliminary study on the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for English-Mandarin bilingual l2 learners

Previous studies into interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) have focused on the influence of subjects' native language (L1) on the phonetic production and perception in their second language (L2). However, no research so far has examined the effect of the listeners' exposure and training in a second language (L2) on their understanding of L2-accented native language (L1). This paper aims to address this issue with subjects whose L1 is English, L2 is Mandarin. Characteristics of Mandarin-accented English include the devoicing of word-final consonants, and the insufficient distinction of the vowel pairs /i:/ - /i/ and /ε/ - /æ/. These features could negatively affect listeners' understanding of contrastive word pairs. In this study, 9 native Mandarin listeners, 9 monolingual English listeners and 9 English-Mandarin bilinguals were asked to listen to recordings of Mandarin-accented English and identify minimal pairs involving the above consonant and vowel contrasts. Results show that among all three groups of subjects, native Mandarin listeners scored the highest accuracy, but English listeners with training in Mandarin and monolingual English speakers had similar scores. These findings support the existence of ISIB for Mandarin, and call for further study on bilingual L2 learners.