4 - Phonetic and Lexical Predictors of Intelligibility

Summary

Abstract In the present investigation, the intelligibility of 17 Scandinavian language varieties and standard Danish was assessed among young Danes from Copenhagen. In addition, distances between standard Danish and each of the 17 varieties were measured at the lexical level and at different phonetic levels. In order to determine how well these linguistic levels can predict intelligibility, we correlated the intelligibility scores with the linguistic distances and we carried out a number of regression analyses. The results show that for this particular set of closely related language varieties phonetic distance is a better predictor of intelligibility than lexical distance. Consonant substitutions, vowel insertions and vowel shortenings contribute significantly to the prediction of intelligibility.

INTRODUCTION

Gooskens (2007) correlated lexical and phonetic distances with mutual intelligibility scores for the Mainland Scandinavian standard languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Subjects from different places in Denmark, Norway and Sweden listened to the two standard languages spoken in the neighbouring countries and linguistic distances were measured between the language varieties of the listeners and the test languages. In total there were 18 mean intelligibility scores and 18 corresponding linguistic distances. The distances were measured at the two linguistic levels that are generally taken to be most important for mutual intelligibility in Scandinavia, namely the lexical and the phonetic level (Delsing and Lundin Åkesson, 2005; Torp, 1998). The results showed a high correlation between intelligibility scores and phonetic distances (r = −.80, p < .01).