Does contextual information within a sentence affect the relationship between word level intelligibility and the Functional Load principle among ELF users? A preliminary study

ABSTRACT

The Functional Load (FL) principle predicts that a high FL phonemic substitution lowers the intelligbility more than a low FL phonemic substitution. However, as yet no study has comprehensively investigated whether contextual information could attenuate any loss of intelligibility due to FL phonemic substitutions. As such, this study investigates the triangular relationship among the FL principle, word level intelligibility, and contextual information within a sentence. A Chinese speaker of English recorded sentences with more and with less contextual information that also had words with no FL substitutions, low FL substitutions, and high FL substitutions. Japanese university students transcribed the missing words from each sentence. The central hypothesis of this study is that missing words with more contextual information within their sentences will be more intelligible than missing words with less contextual information, regardless of any FL substitution. The results supported some of the hypotheses of this study, but not all.

KEYWORDS:

• Functional Load
• intelligibility
• English as a lingua franca
• pronunciation
• context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2023.2251731

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19K13220].