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Comprehension, Irritation And Error Hierarchies, Shaw N. Gynan

Modern & Classical Languages

There are several recurrent themes in the study of native speaker attitudes toward inter­language. First among them treated in a recent review by Ludwig is comprehensibility, that is, the ease with which the native speaker can comprehend nonnative speech.' Research in the area of native speaker attitudes toward nonnative speech reviewed in Ludwig has shown that formal errors are not well related to comprehensibility of interlanguage. "Irritation" is also a topic of considerable interest. An assumption underlying the study of irritation is that even if nonnative speech is comprehensible, the form of the message may be associated with a negative …