Reading passages as design variables in L2 phonology: A three-dimensional framework and an exploratory pilot

Reading passages occupy a privileged position as elicitation instruments in L2 phonology research, yet their internal phonological composition has attracted little systematic scrutiny. This study argues that a reading passage is a methodological design variable: its phonological structure determines which features of speaker variation become observable and which intelligibility-relevant associations can be reliably estimated. To operationalize this argument, this study proposes a three-dimensional validation framework comprising (1) phonological representativeness (phoneme coverage and distributional alignment with conversational speech), (2) elicitation sensitivity (the instrument’s capacity to elicit phonological variation that is differentiated across target speaker populations), and (3) functional relevance (the predictive association between elicited features and listener intelligibility outcomes). The framework is demonstrated through the development and exploratory pilot of the Pan-Asian English Intelligibility Passage (PAEIP), a purpose-built reading passage embedding phonological features documented in English produced by speakers from Southeast, South, and East Asia. Corpus-based analyses indicate complete phonemic coverage and numerically closer rank-order alignment with two spoken corpora (Switchboard and Fisher) than do two widely used benchmark passages. Illustrative data from 12 speakers and 42 listeners provide proof-of-concept evidence that the PAEIP elicits the targeted features at rates that vary with speaker L1 background and that these features predict transcription accuracy. Support across the three dimensions is uneven, and the findings are hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory. The primary contribution is the three-dimensional framework, which offers a principled, replicable basis for evaluating phonological elicitation instruments beyond the Asian context examined in this study.