Intelligibility of British English accents in noise for second-language learners

Standard or prestige accents (e.g., southern British RP, General American) are highly intelligible to a range of native speakers, which may be caused by listener experience (e.g., the accents are frequently heard in the media). The present study investigated the role of experience by testing Mandarin speakers with intermediate English proficiency in terms of their speech-in-noise recognition for a wide range of British English accents. The results demonstrated that Mandarin listeners were highly correlated with native British English listeners in terms of the relative intelligibility of individual talkers, with both groups finding standard accents to be more intelligible. It is thus plausible that the intelligibility of standard accents might be relatively independent from experience; standard accents may tend to have acoustic-phonetic features that make them inherently more intelligible.