The effect of native/non-native information on non-native listeners’ comprehension

Abstract

Using the matched-guise protocol, this study investigated the effect of native/non-native information on non-native listeners’ comprehension. In the experiment, Cantonese-learners of English listened to recordings by a native speaker of American English and completed four comprehension tasks: cloze, multiple-choice, short answer and true/false. Half of the participants were told that the speaker was a native speaker of American English (the American guise group, or AG); whereas the other half were told that the speaker was a Cantonese learner of English (the Cantonese guise group, or CG). The AG group outperformed the CG group in all tasks, except for the short-answer task.

Keywords:

• native
• non-native
• reverse linguistic stereotyping
• listening comprehension

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and Stephanie Lindemann for her helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Guiling Hu

Guiling (Gloria) Hu's research interests include second-language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and cross-linguistic study of prosody. She is currently working in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland, USA.

Jing Su

Jing Su is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at the Guangdong University of Technology, China. Her research interests are in second-language acquisition and English teaching methodology.