可理解性是人类交流的最终目标。然而，直到20世纪40年代物理学家哈维·弗莱彻（Harvey Fletcher）开创了一种心理声学方法学，客观地测量它才变得难以捉摸。另一位物理学家冯·贝克西（von Bekesy）在临床上证明，弗莱彻的临界带理论是以解剖学和听觉现实为基础的。Fletcher和Bekesy的可懂度方法彻底改变了当代对语音信号编码和解码过程的理解。他们的见解在本书中得到了应用，解释了67名来自以下语言背景的非母语人士的发音的可理解性：10名阿拉伯语、10名日语、10名韩语、10名普通话、11名塞尔维亚和克罗地亚语“斯拉夫族”、6名索马里人和10名西班牙语人士，他们阅读了语音口音档案的启发段落。对他们的发音进行了工具性分析，并与10名以美国通用英语（GAE）为母语的人的发音进行了对比。本书中提出的数据驱动的可理解性分析有助于回答以下问题
-母语缺乏语段或超语段/超语段的英语二语使用者能否理解地表达这些语段/超语段？
-如果不能，他们用什么片段或超片段来代替它/它们？
-使用的补偿策略是否会干扰可理解性？
这本书中报告的研究结果基于所有参与者产生的近12000个测量语音标记。其中包括约2000个元音、500多个停止辅音、3000多个擦音、近1200个鼻音、约1500个近似音、1200多个音节的起始音、多达800个音节的尾音、1600多个F0/音高测量值，以及不少于539个双音节词的时长测量值。这些测量值与Baken和Orlikoff（2000:3）一致，并符合广泛接受的只是显著差异阈值，以及Catforda（1987）提供的相对功能负荷计算。
Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English : Focus on Intelligibility (True ePUB)
Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher’s theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher’s and Bekesy’s approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds –10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian ‘the Slavic Group,’ 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions
– Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly?
– If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them?
– Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility?
The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, a over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).
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