Speed bumps for authentic listening material

This article investigates whether authentic native speaker (NS) to NS speech can be madeavailable to the learner listener through the use of a novel slow-down tool. Results fromvarious preliminary tests seem to indicate that the use of a slow-down algorithm in manycases, and in particular in samples with a higher speed rate and word count, leads to animprovement in subjects’ ability to perceive and understand what was being uttered in thesamples. Tests revealed that even NS listeners, as opposed to non-native (NN) listeners, preferto hear authentic NS speech which is either unscripted or is influenced by regional accent, at aslowed down speed. It also seems that ‘unexpected’ words (such as words with high contextualvalue, but which cannot be processed in a top-down fashion because of the size of the soundsnippet) are initially not understood at the original speed of delivery, even in a scripted andcarefully pronounced pedagogic sample. Samples containing chunks or formulaic sequences,however, appear to be easily understood at 100% by the majority of NS listeners due to theholistic processing of these language units