Interlocutors’ judgment of Lx conventional expressions: An exploratory study

Abstract The present study is a perception study that investigates how French L1 speakers evaluate the speech produced by advanced French Lx users that deviates from the pragmatic norms of the local community. More specifically, this exploratory study investigates how conventional expressions that displayed pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic deviances affected the raters’ (N = 62) evaluation of perceived communicative effectiveness and perceived likeability of the speakers in imagined intercultural encounters. Results from the study revealed that deviances were generally judged more severely on both evaluative dimensions than the target conventional expressions. Interestingly, however, findings also showed that deviances that partly included the pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic resources preferred by target community members were evaluated positively. Methodological recommendations to pursue this new line of inquiry in the field of intercultural pragmatics are also discussed.