Volume 53, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Experimental approaches to the mutual intelligibility between closely related languages

In Iceland, Danish is taught as a foreign language parallel to English. One purpose for this is to promote inter-Nordic communication, since Danish is generally held to be intercomprehensible for both Norwegian and Swedish speakers. Assuming the role of tourists, field workers who were native speakers of Danish, Norwegian or Swedish approached Icelandic adolescents (aged 15–20), asking in their native language for directions to the Nordic House in Reykjavík. The investigation was conducted at three different time periods (1983, 1999/2004 and 2006) and showed that the proportion of young people understanding the question thus posed to them decreased from two thirds (1983) to a little less than 40% (2006). At the same time, the number switching to English while answering the question increased. In 2006, a large majority (80%) was inclined to do so, while only one third did so in 1983, roughly 25 years earlier.

Several studies (e.g., Ház 2005) have found German to be easier to understand for Dutch listeners than Dutch for German listeners. This asymmetry has been attributed to the fact that German is an obligatory subject in Dutch secondary school and that many Dutch people watch German television. In contrast, it is much less common for German children to learn Dutch at school and for German people to watch Dutch television. It cannot be excluded, however, that in addition to the extralinguistic factor of language contact, linguistic factors also play a role in the asymmetric intelligibility between German and Dutch. The present study aimed at gaining insight into the phonetic-phonological factors playing a role in Dutch-German intelligibility at the word level for speakers of the respective languages in a first confrontation (i.e., assuming no prior language contact). We presented highly frequent Dutch and German cognate nouns, recorded by a perfect bilingual speaker, to Dutch and German children between 9 and 12 years in a word translation task. The German and Dutch children were comparable in that they did not know the other language or a related dialect and expressed equally positive attitudes towards the other language, its speakers and the country. It was thus ensured that language contact and language attitude could not play a role in the present study. Our results revealed that the Dutch subjects were significantly better at understanding the German cognates (50.2% correct translations) than the German subjects were at understanding the Dutch cognates (41.9%). Since the relevant extra-linguistic factors had been excluded, the asymmetry must have a linguistic basis. A thorough analysis of the 16 cognate pairs with an asymmetry larger than 20% showed that (combinations of) neighbors (lexical competitors), phonetic detail and asymmetric perceptions of corresponding sounds play a major role in the explanation of the asymmetry.

This paper predicts the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects from multiple objective distance measures. Empirical mutual intelligibility measures were obtained from functional intelligibility tests at the sentence level from 15 listeners for each of 15 Chinese dialects. We computed various proximity measures on the basis of shared phonemes and tones in the sound inventories of the 15 dialects. Next, Levenshtein (string-edit) distance measures were computed on the 764 common syllabic units ( zi in Pinyin, i.e., a meaningful character or morpheme with a complete transcription of segments and tone) shared by the same 15 Chinese dialects in the Dialect Sound Database of Modern Chinese (compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). Unweighted and perceptually weighted Levenshtein distance measures were computed. We also included objective similarity measures of phonological correspondence, based on the Zihui character list and of lexical affinity, based on the Cihui cross-dialect lexical database with all cognate and non-cognate expressions of 905 core concepts) that have been published by Cheng (1997). The best single predictor of mutual intelligibility between a pair of dialects was the percentage of cognates shared between them ( r 2  = .548). Including all predictors afforded a highly accurate prediction of mutual intelligibility ( R 2  = .874). A very reasonable prediction is afforded if we just add the lexical frequency of finals (syllable rhymes) shared by a pair of dialects ( R 2  = .611).

This article presents methods and findings from research on factors that determine the recognizability of cognate words in Germanic intercomprehension (more precisely: German speakers' reading comprehension in Germanic languages they have not learnt). Different types of written tests were carried out (free response, multiple choice, judgments on the probability of two words being cognates) in order to assess the importance of different aspects of linguistic similarity for the transparency of written cognates. Apart from the overall amount of differing segments of the cognate words, phonetic similarity between the differing segments – in particular an identical place of articulation – turned out to be most important, which can reflect either a spontaneous sense of similarity or familiarity with phenomena of variation between phonetically similar sounds. By adjusting similarity measuring to these results (weighted Levenshtein distance), it is possible, to a certain degree, to assess the transparency of cognates. Nevertheless, certain results could not be explained by phonetic similarity. Thus, recordings were made of subjects commenting on their way of proceeding in such tasks as well as in text decoding, which made clear that the subjects often attribute the same importance to other associations as they do to phonetic ones – even in the recognition of isolated words semantic connections in the mental lexicon are involved. In text context, the most frequent strategy seems to rely on an interplay of phonetic similarity and inference; however, in the subjects' reflections, the aspect of semantic probability manifestly overrides intuitions about phonetic similarity.

In an exploratory study of mutual intelligibility between the sign languages of the northern part of Belgium (Flemish Sign Language, VGT), the southern part of Belgium (French Belgian Sign Language, LSFB), and the Netherlands (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), we tested the comprehension of VGT by signers of LSFB and NGT. In order to measure the influence of iconic structures (classifier constructions and constructed action) that linguistic analyses have shown to be similar across different sign languages, two genres were compared: narrative and informative signing. To investigate the effect of the overlap between the spoken languages surrounding the Dutch and Flemish Deaf communities, videos were presented in two conditions: first without and subsequently with mouthings. As we hypothesized, both LSFB and NGT signers understood narratives better than informative signing, showing for the first time that iconic structures facilitate comprehension of foreign signing. Furthermore, the results at least partially confirm our hypothesis that NGT signers benefit more from mouthings than LSFB signers, uncovering a source of intelligibility that is unique to sign languages.

This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the participants with 50 spoken stimuli in their neighboring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture-pointing task. Results revealed that while Danish children held more positive attitudes towards Swedish than vice versa and their word recognition scores were generally higher than those of their Swedish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that the two variables are only loosely linked.