Some thoughts on intelligibility

Abstract

Intelligibility is a concept which has been widely appealed to by linguists. However, as a technical term, it does not have a precise definition subscribed to by all linguists. This is caused partly by the fact that intelligibility is an everyday term of lay usage, where imprecision is tolerable.

This article examines certain aspects of intelligibility which need to be included in any technical linguistic definition of the term. In particular, it focuses on the use of the term in the establishment of pronunciation models for foreign learners, although most of the factors discussed apply equally well to other linguistic areas (Olsson, 1972, 1977). Intelligibility has for long been acknowledged as an important criterion for any pronunciation model (e.g. Halliday et al., 1964:296) and several recent works on pronunciation teaching (e.g. Kenworthy, 1987; Tench, 1981) devote sections to discussion of aspects of the concept.

The importance to intelligibility of speaker-oriented articulatory features is obvious to all language teachers. This is often couched in terms of clarity of speech, although, as Brown (1977) points out, this may lead to over carefulness on the part of the learner, which is not always the ideal. In particular, the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables in English lies not only in that stressed syllables are said clearly and carefully, but also in that unstressed syllables are correspondingly indistinct. Failure to produce this difference between stress and unstress (e.g. by the common learner strategy of making every syllable distinct by overcareful pronunciation) results in a breakdown of the whole stress system. The consequent pronunciation may therefore be harder to understand - a fact which it is often difficult for the English teacher to get across to the learner.

Here we will concentrate instead on the other stages of the speech chain: the categories of transmission and listener-oriented features.