Chapter 10: Can Clarity Surpass Familiarity?: Japanese EFL Learners’ /ɹ/ and /l/ Phoneme Production Post-Pronunciation Training as Assessed by Listeners with Diverse English Variety Backgrounds

It is commonly believed that a native speaker prefers to listen to speech in that person’s own dialect due to its high comprehensibility and intelligibility and its general lack of noticeable phonemic aberrances. A study was conducted where native English speakers with different dialects rated the intelligibility and acceptability of Japanese EFL learners’ English /ɹ/ and /l/ pronunciation. Results revealed that the number of instances of statistically significant differences between the native speaker judges’ ratings pre– and post–pronunciation training were cut by nearly half, which suggests that listener background dialect factors in less than phoneme clarity in word–level phonemic production.