Intelligibility and comprehensibility in English as a lingua franca: nativized English in Japanese

Abstract

The present study examines international intelligibility and comprehensibility of nativized English lexis from Japanese as determined by tertiary student listeners in four countries. After an overview of nativized English in Japanese, form and attitudes, the study queries which linguistic features of Japanized English lexis and short expressions reduce intelligibility and comprehensibility for listeners from Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and the United States. The results indicate that morphological and semantic modifications tend to be more challenging to the Indonesian, Filipino, and US listener groups than phonological ones, while South Korean listeners had an advantage with nativized expressions. Rank orders of the difficulty of individual items tended to be shared by the Filipino and US groups. Listener factors were identified including first language (L1) influence, English proficiency, and sociocultural background. Further considered are linguistic complexity, cultural, and historical linguistic flows, Englishes as dialectal variation, and ELF pronunciation pedagogy.

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