Examining the linguistic aspects of speech that most efficiently discriminate between the upper levels of the revised IELTS pronunciation scale

The goal of the funded project is to identify the linguistic factors that most efficiently distinguish between adjacent levels of the IELTS pronunciation scale. Speech samples on the IELTS long turn task will be analysed using a range of linguistic measures (e.g., segmental, prosodic, temporal, lexicogrammatical) and triangulated with raters' interview data about influences on their judgments. The results will elucidate the linguistic factors that underlie "comprehensible" speech at different levels of pronunciation ability.