Intelligibility of English regular verbs in the past tense: A study with Brazilian listeners and speakers of different L1s

Resumo

This study investigated the intelligibility of regular verbs in the past produced by eight speakers of English whose first language (L1) were English, German, Spanish, or Brazilian Portuguese. Fourteen Brazilian learners of English participated as listeners and orthographically transcribed sentences produced by the speakers in two intelligibility tests. Acoustic analysis of the productions revealed that some verbs were produced in a non-target like form, but all productions were kept in the intelligibility tests in order to reflect the variability of input received by Brazilian learners of English. The orthographic transcriptions were analyzed and classified as intelligible (when transcriptions matched the form produced by the speaker), other verb forms (when transcriptions matched the verb produced, but in a different tense or form), and breakdowns in communication (when transcriptions mismatched the target verb or when the verb or the entire sentence was not transcribed). Results reveal that the number of intelligible verbs increased from the first to the second intelligibility test. The number of other verb forms decreased, and the number of breakdowns remained quite similar across the two tests. Results also indicate that speakers’ L1, listeners’ lack of familiarity with speakers’ accent and English pronunciation, as well as test conditions possibly influenced the intelligibility of verbs ending in -ed by Brazilian listeners.