Intelligibility

INTELLIGIBILITY

According to Smith and Nelson. Intelligibility is a linguistic interaction between speaker and hearer. So being intelligible means being understood by an interlocutor at a given time in a given situation.

Though, intelligibility is the ability of the listener to recognize individual words or utterances.

Also, intellibility depeds to the behaviour, i.e., a listener who expects to understand a speaker will be more likely to find that speaker comprehensible than one who does not.

COMPREHENSIBILITY: Is the listener´s ability to understand the meaning of the words or utterances in its given context.

INTERPRETABILITY: Is the listener´s ability to understand the speaker´s intentions behind the words or utterances, and matters of meaning.

Rhythm

As you know, spoken English words with two or more syllables have different stress and length patterns. Some syllables are stressed more than others and some syllables are pronounced longer than others.

The same is true of phrases and sentences. Different words in a sentence have stronger stress and are pronounced longer and other words are weaker and shorter. This pattern of strong and weak stress and short and long pronunciation gives English its rhythm.

It is important for non-native speakers to understand and master the rhythm of English. If the wrong words are stressed in a sentence or if all words are pronounced with the same length or loudness, the speech will be difficult to understand.

Words that have the most stress in English are called content words. Content words are usually the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns (demonstrative, possessive, reflexive, and interrogative). These words are important to express the main meaning of the sentence.

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