This study examines the effects of task complexity on second language (L2) pronunciation accuracy and global pronunciation measures in pronunciation-unfocused tasks and assesses the relationship between acoustic and listener-based pronunciation measures. Eighty-two Catalan/Spanish learners of English performed simple and complex versions of a problem-solving monologic speaking task, for which the oral stops /p, t, k/ and vowel contrasts /iː/-/ɪ/ and /æ/-/ᴧ/ were embedded in the lexical items used to perform the task. Pronunciation accuracy was gauged through acoustic measurements of laryngeal timing (voice onset time), vowel contrastiveness and nativelikeness (Mahalanobis distances), and native speakers’ ratings of comprehensibility and accentedness. Results revealed detrimental effects of increased task complexity on the productions of oral stops and speech comprehensibility and accentedness; however, no consistent task complexity effects were found on vowel accuracy. The analysis also revealed an association between segmental accuracy and global dimensions of L2 speech.

Ideally, comprehensible second language (L2) speech would be seen as acceptable speech. However, the association between these dimensions is underexplored. To investigate the relationship between comprehensibility and “academic acceptability,” defined here as how well a speaker could meet the demands of a given role in an academic setting, 204 university stakeholders judged L2 speech samples elicited from a standardized English test used for university admissions. Four tasks from 100 speakers were coded for 13 speech stream characteristics. Judgments for comprehensibility and acceptability correlated strongly (r = .93). Linear mixed-effects models, used to examine judgments across all tasks and separately for each task, indicated that while random intercepts (i.e., speaker ability, listener severity) explained a substantial amount of total variation (32–44%) in listener judgments compared to speech characteristic fixed effects (8–21%), fixed effects did account for variation in speaker random effects (reducing variation compared to intercept-only models by 50–90%). Despite some minimal differences across task types, the influence of speech characteristics across both judgments was mostly similar. While providing evidence that comprehensible speech can indeed be perceived as acceptable, this study also provides evidence that speakers demonstrate both consistent and less consistent performance, in reference to speech stream production, across performances.

The comprehensible style of legal texts seems to be a predominantly linguistic problem. This is how the plain-legal-language movements present it. But, while plain-language statutes have been on the agenda for decades in every civilised country, laws still become more and more complicated. The paper attempts to explain this controversy. First, it argues that comprehensibility has more aspects beyond the linguistic or stylistic one. Sometimes it is the linguistically simplest texts that raise the most serious comprehensibility problems. The paper refers to two pieces of corpus linguistic research that provide evidence that vocabulary and grammar in themselves do not explain the incomprehensibility of the legal texts. Second, for a more subtle handling of the comprehensibility problem, the paper offers a framework of three typical pragmatic situations – the processual, the problem-solving and the compliance settings – where comprehensibility problems arise in different ways. The conclusion of the paper is that, contrary to the usual explanation that the main reason for incomprehensibility is that, in law, clarity and accuracy can be only employed at each other's expense, it is rather the systemic and interpretive character of law and the growing importance of technical rules that hinder the understanding of legal texts.

The current project investigated the extent to which several lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech – appropriateness, fluency, variation, sophistication, abstractness, sense relations – interact to influence native speakers’ judgements of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness). Extemporaneous speech elicited from 40 French speakers of English with varied L2 proficiency levels was first evaluated by 10 native-speaking raters for comprehensibility and accentedness. Subsequently, the dataset was transcribed and analyzed for 12 lexical factors. Various lexical properties of L2 speech were found to be associated with L2 comprehensibility, and especially lexical accuracy (lemma appropriateness) and complexity (polysemy), indicating that these lexical variables are associated with successful L2 communication. In contrast, native speakers’ accent judgements seemed to be linked to surface-level details of lexical content (abstractness) and form (variation, morphological accuracy) rather than to its conceptual and contextual details (e.g., lemma appropriateness, polysemy).

The goal of this study was to determine which linguistic aspects of second language speech are related to accent and which to comprehensibility. To address this goal, 19 different speech measures in the oral productions of 40 native French speakers of English were examined in relation to accent and comprehensibility, as rated by 60 novice raters and three experienced teachers. Results showed that both constructs were associated with many speech measures, but that accent was uniquely related to aspects of phonology, including rhythm and segmental and syllable structure accuracy, while comprehensibility was chiefly linked to grammatical accuracy and lexical richness.

Creditor protection through mandatory disclosure since long is a highly debated issue among corporate lawyers. This paper considers whether the legal system should compel corporations to disclose information publicly in order to better protect its creditors. First, the paper elaborates on the various economic rationales of mandatory disclosure advanced by proponents of that approach. Second, it rehearses the theoretical framework of mandatory disclosure. Third, it gives a brief overview of the law on those mandatory disclosure requirements that primarily or at least in part aim at corporate creditor protection. Fourth, it outlines limitations of mandatory disclosure with respect to creditors and debtor companies. Fifth, it briefly surveys several important challenges to mandatory disclosure regulation with respect to materiality, standardization, comprehensibility and timeliness. And finally, this paper deals with various legislative options to enforce creditor-protective mandatory disclosure.