Abstract

The present study explores the challenges of lingua franca intercultural communication in Asia Pacific in view of non-native speakers’ communicative (phonetic) competence in English. With the eastward shift of the global economy, and the advancement of English as the intermediary language in East Asia, strong demands in achieving high English proficiency have been imposed upon non-native interlocutors involved in lingua franca communication in the region. However, East Asian mesolect speakers of English tend to demonstrate particular features in their accent, which may somehow impede communication. The authors proceed from the assumption that accent in late bilingualism may be attributed to cognitive constraints mandatory for processing linguistically important phonological information of the speakers’ native language, and, thus, should be viewed as a likely feature of non-native (L2) phonetic competence, i.e. phonetic organization of speech by functional language users. Phonetic competence, treated in the present article as part and parcel of overall human ability to communicate, is regarded especially important in the context of intercultural interaction via intermediary language. Given the intrinsic relation between the sound system of the language and mental structures (mapping of sound representations and meanings), as well as cognitive and mental computational processes characteristic of human speech, the role of phonetic means is argued to be vital for achieving real-life communicative goals, such as conveying a message, signaling interrupting, asking for clarification, changing the subject, concluding an argument, etc. The findings of the research on intelligibility of East Asian English accent, which involved a shadowing experiment with participation of non-native and native speakers of English, and of the survey on East Asian English comprehensibility, are presented. The importance of developing L2 phonetic competence and perceptual adaptation strategies in lingua franca intercultural communication is discussed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.