Non-native speaker incompetence as a construction of the native listener: Attitudes and their relationship to perception and comprehension of Korean-accented English.

Abstract

This study combines insights from the language attitudes, conversation analysis, and speech perception literatures, and empirically tests whether there is a relationship between negative attitudes toward Korean-accented English and poor perception and comprehension of such English. Attitudes of native English speakers were assessed using a modified matched guise task; these study participants were then given a perception task in which they identified individual familiar English words spoken by native Korean speakers. Finally, a subset of these listeners was asked to complete an interactional task paired with native speakers of Korean. In the attitudes task, native English-speaking listeners were often unable to identify the ethnicity of Korean speakers, frequently guessing them to be members of other stigmatized groups. They also generally rated Koreans more negatively than they rated native English speakers. Despite this overall difference, ratings of Korean speakers varied across listeners, allowing for comparison between varying attitudes and perception and comprehension. No relationship was found between perceptual accuracy and attitude, although it was speculated that a relationship may exist between listener attitude and evaluations of speaker intelligibility. In the interactive task, some, but not all, of the native English speakers who had been assessed as having negative attitudes to Koreans were found to use either strategies that were described as problematizing their partners' utterances, or strategies that were described as avoidance. All participants completed the map task reasonably successfully except where the native English speaker relied on avoidance strategies, suggesting that the relationship between attitude and comprehension is not a direct one. Rather, it appears to be mediated by the native speaker's choice of strategies. However, native English-speaking partners with negative attitudes to Koreans never rated their interactions with Koreans as successful, whereas those with positive attitudes to Koreans always did. This indicates a direct relationship between attitude and perceived success of interactions with Koreans. These findings suggest a social world constructed by some native speakers in which non-native speakers are a largely ethnically undifferentiated group lacking in communicative competence. Implications for the study of communicative breakdown, particularly between native and non-native speakers, are discussed.