Charlotte Gooskens

Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data

The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carry out this analysis to see the degree to which the average Levenshtein distances correspond to the psychoacoustic perception of the speakers of the dialects. The present article reports on part of a study supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We are grateful for the permission from Kristian Skarbo and Jorn Almberg to use their material and for the help of Jorn Almberg during the whole investigation. We thank Saakje van Dellen for her obliging help with the data entry and Peter Kleiweg for letting us use the programs that he developed for the visualization of the maps and dendrograms in this article. Finally, we would like to thank John Nerbonne for valuable comments and for correcting our English.

Identification of Language Varieties: The Contribution of Different Linguistic Levels

Three experiments are described investigating the role of different linguistic levels in the identification of language varieties. The results reveal that prosodic features play a minor role in the identification of language varieties, both in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands. The role of pronunciation varies. In some cases, pronunciation alone leads to better identification than cues at all linguistic levels, including pronunciation. Further research is needed to gain insight into the precise nature of the processes underlying the identification of language varieties. Also, the role of identification of language varieties in relation to vocal stereotypes in the attribution of personality characteristics to speakers should be further investigated.

The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages

The three mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) are so closely related that the speakers mostly communicate in their own languages (semicommunication). Even though the three West Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are also closely related, semicommunication is not usual between these languages. In the present investigation, results from intelligibility tests measuring the mutual intelligibility of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish were compared with results of similar tests of mutual intelligibility between speakers of Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans. The results show that there are large differences in the level of intelligibility depending on test group and test language. Correlations between the intelligibility scores and linguistic distance scores showed that intelligibility can to a large extent be predicted by phonetic distances, while intelligibility is less predictable on the basis of lexical distances.

Evaluation of String Distance Algorithms for Dialectology

We examine various string distance measures for suitability in modeling dialect distance, especially its perception. We find measures superior which do not normalize for word length, but which are are sensitive to order. We likewise find evidence for the superiority of measures which incorporate a sensitivity to phonological context, realized in the form of n-grams--although we cannot identify which form of context (bigram, trigram, etc.) is best. However, we find no clear benefit in using gradual as opposed to binary segmental difference when calculating sequence distances.

Is spoken Danish less intelligible than Swedish

The most straightforward way to explain why Danes understand spoken Swedish relatively better than Swedes understand spoken Danish would be that spoken Danish is intrinsically a more difficult language to understand than spoken Swedish. We discuss circumstantial evidence suggesting that Danish is intrinsically poorly intelligible. We then report on a formal experiment in which we tested the intelligibility of Danish and Swedish materials spoken by three representative male speakers per language (isolated cognate and non-cognate words, words in semantically unpredictable sentences, words in spontaneous interaction in map tasks) presented in descending levels of noise to native listeners of Danish (N=18) and Swedish (N=24), respectively. The results show that Danish is as intelligible to Danish listeners as Swedish is to Swedish listeners. In a separate task, the same listeners recognized the same materials (presented without noise) in the neighboring language. The asymmetry that has traditionally been claimed was indeed found, even when differences in familiarity with the non-native language were controlled for. Possible reasons for the asymmetry are discussed.

Phonetic and lexical predictors of intelligibility

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.

Linguistic Determinants of the Intelligibility of Swedish Words among Danes

In the present investigation we aim to determine to which degree various linguistic factors contribute to the intelligibility of Swedish words among Danes. We correlated the results of an experiment on word intelligibility with eleven linguistic factors and carried out logistic regression analyses. In the experiment, the intelligibility of 384 frequent Swedish words was tested among Danish listeners via the Internet. The choice of eleven linguistic factors was motivated by their contribution to intelligibility in earlier studies. The highest correlation was found in the negative correlation between word intelligibility and phonetic distances. Also word length, different syllable numbers, foreign sounds, neighbourhood density, word frequency, orthography, and the absence of the prosodic phenomenon of ‘stod’ 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 was not...

Syllable reduction and articulation rates in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish

This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) among these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of sentences read aloud. The results of the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhibits a much larger degree of syllable reduction in speech than Norwegian and Swedish. The finding that certain syllable deletion processes take place in Danish but not in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. The results indicate that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts. This could be a contributing factor to problems that arise in inter-Scandinavian communication.

Traveling time as a predictor of linguistic distance

The aim of the present investigation 1 was to get an impression of the geographic influences on the dialectal variation in a country. In previous investigations, the correlations between linguistic distances and geographic distances using dialect data from the Netherlands and Norway were calculated (Gooskens and Heeringa 2004, Nerbonne et al. 1996). The results showed a high correlation in the case of Dutch data while the correlation was considerably lower in the case of Norwegian data. This seems to reflect the fact that especially for Norway the direct distance between two settlements does not reflect the difficulty of travel and therefore social contact, which is expected to play a role in keeping linguistic distance within limits. Holland is a country with a flat, regularly populated landscape with few natural obstacles such as mountains and rivers. This is in great contrast with Norway with its high mountains and many fjords which made it quite difficult to travel between places, especially in the past. These differences in geographical situations are clearly reflected in the correlations between the linguistic and geographical distances between the dialects of the two countries. The present investigation is searching for more successful ways of predicting linguistic distances by means of geographic distances in Norway. To this end, old and new traveling data were used providing information about traveling times by road, train, and boat between the places where the different dialects are spoken. The results show that a large part of the linguistic variation can be accounted for by geography in Norway, just as in the Netherlands. However, in the case of a geographically more compli

Mutual Comprehensibility of Written Afrikaans and Dutch: Symmetrical or Asymmetrical?

The two West-Germanic languages Dutch and Afrikaans are so closely related that they can be expected to be mutually intelligible to a large extent. The present investigation focuses on written language. Comprehension was established by means of cloze tests on the basis of two newspaper articles. Results suggest that it is easier for Dutch subjects to understand written Afrikaans than it is for South African subjects to understand written Dutch. In order to explain the results, attitudes as well as several types of linguistic distances were assessed. The relations between attitude scales and intelligibility scores were few and weak. Asymmetries in the linguistic relationships between the two languages are probably more important, especially the asymmetries in the number of noncognates and the opacity of the relatedness of cognates. These asymmetries are caused by historical developments in Dutch and Afrikaans, with respect to the lexicon, grammar, and spelling.