Mutual intelligibility
of closely related languages
MICReLa
Ongoing projects
(with Gerard Doetjes, Nasjonalt senter for fremmedspråk i opplæringen, Høgskolen i Østfold)
In this investigation we will focus on the different relationships between the written and the spoken languages in Sweden and Denmark. These differences are often mentioned as an explanation for the asymmetric intelligibility between Swedish and Danish. The Danish spoken language has developed very rapidly during the last 50 years. As a result there is a large distance between spoken and written Danish. This difference is smaller in Swedish, where the spoken language has developed less rapidly. The orthographies in the two countries have changed less drastically and therefore written Swedish and Danish are much more similar than the spoken languages. The different relationships between the spoken and written languages in the two countries have resulted in different points of departures as far as the understanding of the spoken neighboring language is concerned. When a Dane hears a Swedish word he often has more support from the Danish spelling of the corresponding word than a Swede hearing the corresponding Danish word has from the Swedish spelling. This may be part of the explanation for the Swedish-Danish asymmetric intelligibility. We plan word recognition experiments in order to test this hypothesis.
Danish and Swedish are closely related languages that are generally mutually intelligible. It has consistently been reported, however, that Danish-speaking listeners decode more Swedish items than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than spoken Danish is to written Swedish. We hypothesise here that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. L1 Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. The critical manipulation was performed on cognates (words sharing form and meaning across languages), whose pronunciation differed in one phonetic segment only (e.g., the word mild is pronounced /mild/ in Swedish but /milʔ/ in Danish). Half of the Swedish cognates were pronounced in a way that would be consistent with the spelling of the Danish word (i.e., orthographically consistent cognates), while the other half were pronounced in a way that would not be consistent with the spelling of the Danish word (i.e., orthographically inconsistent cognates). Event-related-brain potentials (ERPs) in the translation task were obtained to these consistent and inconsistent cognates to study the on-line brain responses during decoding operations (i.e., the first 1000ms). Our data showed that ERPs to inconsistent words were significantly more negative going than ERPs to consistent words between 750 and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word recognition scores for consistent items, our data provides strong evidence that on-line activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.
Finished projects