Linguistic Determinants of the Intelligibility of Swedish Words among Danes
Linguistic Determinants of the Intelligibility of Swedish Words among Danes
This chapter investigates the degree to which various linguistic factors contribute to the intelligibility of Swedish words among Danes. It correlates the results of an experiment on word intelligibility with eleven linguistic factors and performs logistic regression analyses. In the experiment, it tests the intelligibility of 384 frequent Swedish words among Danish listeners via the Internet. It shows that the highest correlation occurs in the negative correlation between word intelligibility and phonetic distance. Moreover, word length, different syllable numbers, foreign sounds, neighbourhood density, word frequency, orthography, and the absence of the prosodic phenomenon of ‘stød’ in Swedish contribute significantly to intelligibility. Although the results thus show that linguistic factors contribute to the intelligibility of single words, the amount of explained variance is not very large when compared with earlier studies which were based on aggregate intelligibility. The lower correlation can also be attributed to the higher number of idiosyncrasies of single words compared with the aggregate intelligibility and linguistic distance used in earlier studies.
Keywords: linguistic factors, Swedish, Danish, intelligibility, phonetic distance, word length, foreign sounds, word frequency, orthography, single words
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