We investigated the intelligibility of written Danish for Swedes, and in particular the role of inherited words compared to non-Germanic loanwords. To assess whether shared loanwords are easier to understand than inherited words, we conducted two experiments. First, we tested the intelligibility of isolated Danish words (inherited words and loanwords) among Swedes. Second, we constructed two versions of a reading test, one with a large percentage of loanwords and one with few loanwords. Our results show that it is easier for Swedish listeners to identify and understand Danish cognate loanwords than inherited words and that texts with many loanwords are easier to read than texts with few loanwords. We explain these results by the fact that (recent) loans in Swedish have diverged less and are therefore more similar to the Danish counterparts than inherited words.

We report on a large-scale investigation of the mutual intelligibility between five Germanic languages: Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. We tested twenty language combinations using the same uniform methodology, making the results commensurable for the first time. We first tested both written and spoken language by means of cloze tests. Next we calculated linguistic distance at the levels of lexicon, orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax. We also quantified exposure and attitudes towards the test languages. Finally, we carried out a regression analysis to determine the relative importance of these linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors for the mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages. The extra-linguistic predictor exposure was the most significant factor in predicting intelligibility in the Germanic language area. The effect of attitude was very small. Lexical distance, orthographic and phonetic distances were the most important linguistic predictors of intelligibility.

Several factors affect the comprehension of a text written in a language related to the reader's first language (L1): (i) orthographic similarity with the reader's L1, (ii) contextual clues, (iii) semantic relationships between components of phraseological units, and (iv) L1 reading comprehension strategies. This article compares the results of a cloze test (CT), in which a group of Finns read a text in their L1 (Finnish) and filled the gaps, and a translation test (TT), in which another group of Finns translated the Estonian version of the same text into Finnish. This text included five pairs of primes and targets, parts of the same phraseological unit, representing different semantic relations; in the CT the target was replaced by a gap and in the TT the respondents had to translate the target. The results indicated that the respondents used similar inferencing strategies in both tests, and thus provide evidence for the assumption that orthographic similarity is not the sole factor contributing to understanding a foreign text, but that L1 reading comprehension strategies are also employed.