L2 Auditory Processing of Three Spanish Dialects. Comprehensibility and its Relationship with Accentedness and Familiarity.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the impact on comprehensibility judgments – the difficulty that listeners perceive they have in understanding an utterance – in the auditory processing of three dialects of Spanish by second language learners (L2) of Spanish. Previous research focused mainly on the comprehensibility of different dialects of English by L2 listeners, showing these listeners might judge one dialect as more difficult to understand than another. Similarly, in the current study, results show that L2 Spanish listeners judge some Spanish dialects as being more comprehensible than others. Furthermore, comprehensibility has been studied in relation to other two constructs, accentedness and familiarity. The Mexican dialect has been judged as being the most comprehensible, the least accented and the most familiar by L2 listeners.