Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

‘intelligibility’. Smith and Nelson (1985) defined intelligibility in terms of “word and utterance recognition” (cited in Rajadurai, 2007, p. 89), whereas comprehensibility is defined as a quality of the discourse which enables a listener or reader to understand the meaning of the words and utterances of the propositional content. In other words, intelligibility represents a low level of understanding while comprehensibility represents understanding of a higher order. James (1998) has viewed comprehensibility as a superordinate cover term referring to “all aspects of the accessibility of the content…of utterances” (as opposed to the form), while reserving the term intelligibility to refer to the “accessibility of the basic, literal meaning” (p. 212). Smith (1992) has suggested that these should be seen on a continuum, with intelligibility being the lowest, followed by comprehensibility. He included a third term, interpretability, which refers to the “perception of the speaker's intentions”. Munro and Derwing (1995) have suggested that the three terms rank on a scale of importance with regard to the understanding of texts, with intelligibility being of least importance and interpretability the most, although Jenkins (2000, cited in Rajadurai, 2007) has rejected this, saying that intelligibility is a prerequisite of successful communication.

Very few scholars have attempted to identify the components that make up comprehensibility, most assuming that it is an intuitive notion which readers understand. Gass and Varonis (1984) have suggested that comprehensibility is a function of several aspects of speech—pronunciation, grammar, and so forth—which they schematise with the equation given below:

The equation must obviously be considered only as a very rough indication of the factors that make up comprehensibility, and the simple addition of these belies their complex interaction. There is also a notable absence of any reference to semantic and pragmatic considerations in