Renee van Bezooijen

Recognition of Vocal Expressions of Emotion: A Three-Nation Study to Identify Universal Characteristics

The results of three experiments showed that Dutch, Taiwanese, and Japanese adults were able to identify Dutch vocal expressions of emotion beyond chance expectancy. Inspection of the confusion data further revealed that, in addition to symmetrical confusions, there were quite a few confusions that were asymmetrical. The outcomes of a multidimensional scaling finally suggested that confusions were a function of similarity in levels of activity of the emotions concerned rather than, for example, similarity in evaluative meaning. The conclusion was that there are universally recognizable characteristics of vocal patterns of emotion and that these characteristics are primarily related to the activity dimension of emotional meaning.

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.

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...

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.

Approximant /r/ in Dutch: Routes and feelings

Abstract At present, three variants of /r/ co-occur in northern Standard Dutch i.e. the variant of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands. In addition to the older alveolar and uvular consonantal types of /r/, there is now an approximant type of /r/, which is restricted to syllable coda. This approximant /r/ has been around at least since the beginning of the 20th century, but it seems that it recently started to expand. In this article, two sociophonetic studies are described of this ongoing change. In the first study, three hypotheses based on statements in the literature are tested: approximant /r/ is spreading from the west to other parts of the Netherlands, it is used more often by women than by men, and it is used more often by children than by adults. All three hypotheses were confirmed. In the second study, we studied how approximant /r/ is received: Do people find it attractive? Is it associated with particular personality characteristics? Where do people think it is spoken? The matched-guise approach was used, in which one speaker read the same text with different /r/-variants. It appeared that listeners from the west find approximant /r/ more attractive than listeners from other regions. Its use, at least when it is not perceptually salient, does not affect listeners’ impressions of how likeable the speaker is; it is associated, however, with a high social position and with people living in the western part of the country.

Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by children: The devil is in the detail

Abstract 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.

Accentedness Ratings and Phonological Variables as Measures of Variation in Pronunciation

Verbally neutral, spontaneous speech samples were selected from interviews with 16 younger and 16 older males (mean ages 17 and 69 years, respectively) varying in socio-economic status (SES). All informants were native of Nijmegen, a city in the mideast of the Netherlands. The speech samples were rated with respect to the degree of accentedness and the pronunciation of six phonological variables with variants typical for the Nijmegen dialect. A factor analysis based on the correlations among the phonological variables yielded two factors, the first with high loadings of the four vowels, the second with a high loading of one of the two consonants, the /v/. The other consonant, the /z/, did not contribute to either factor. There was a strong correlation between the factor-1 scores on the one hand and accentedness and SES on the other. The factor-2 scores correlated with age. Some methodological and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Introduction: Language Variation Studies and Computational Humanities

The volume we are introducing here contains a selection of the papers presented at a special track on computational techniques for studying language variation held at The Thirteenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology in Leeds on 4–5 August 2008. We are grateful to the conference organisers, Nigel Armstrong, Joan Beal, Fiona Douglas, Barry Heselwood, Susan Lacey, Ann Thompson, and Clive Upton for their cooperation in our organisation of the event. We likewise owe thanks to the referees of the present volume, who we are pleased to acknowledge explicitly: Agnes de Bie, Roberto Bolognesi, David Britain, Cynthia Clopper, Ken Decker, Anders Eriksson, Hans Goebl, Stefan Grondelaers, Carlos Gussenhoven, Nynke de Haas, Frans Hinskens, Angela Kluge, Gitte Kristiansen, Alexandra Lenz, Maarten Mous, Hermann Niebaum, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Petya Osenova, John Paolillo, Louis Pols, Helge Sandøy, Bob Shackleton, Felix Schaeffler, Marco Spruit, Rint Sybesma, Nathan Vaillette, Gunther de Vogelaer, and Esteve Valls. The conference track consisted of 24 papers and posters, including a keynote address by Vincent van Heuven on phonetic techniques for studying variation and comprehensibility. Fourteen contributions were selected for publication in this special issue of the International Journal for Humanities and Arts Computing, including van Heuven’s. In addition the conference track featured a panel session reflecting on the introduction of computational techniques to the study of language variation and more generally, on computing and the humanities. We have prepared a report on the panel session for publication here as well.

Lexical and orthographic distances between Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages and their relationship to geographic distance (Wilbert Heeringa, Jelena Golubovic, Charlotte Gooskens, Anja Schüppert, Femke Swarte & Stefanie Voigt)

When reading texts of different but closely related languages, intelligibility is determined among others by the number of words which are cognates of words in the reader’s language, and orthographic differences. Orthographic differences partly reflect pronunciation differences and therefore are partly a linguistic level. Dialectometric studies in particular showed that different linguistic levels may correlate with each other and with geography. This may raise the question of whether both lexical distance and orthographic distance need to be included in a model which explains written intelligibility, or whether both factors can even be replaced by geographic distance. We study the relationship between lexical and orthographic variation among Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages to each other and to geography. The lexical distance is the percentage of non-cognate pairs, and the orthographic distance is the average of the Levenshtein distances of the cognate pairs. For each language group we found a significant correlation between lexical and orthographic distances with a medium effect size. Therefore, when modelling written intelligibility preferably both factors are included in the model. We considered several measures of geographic distance where languages are located at the center or capital of the countries where they are spoken. Both as-the-crowflies distances and travel distances were considered. Largest effect sizes are obtained when correlating lexical distances with travel distances between capitals and when correlating orthographic distances with as-the-crow-flies distances between capitals. The results show that geographic distance may represent lexical and orthographic distance to some extent in a model of written intelligibility.

Language policies and attitudes towards Frisian in the Netherlands (Nanna Haug Hilton & Charlotte Gooskens)

This paper reports on an investigation into covertly and overtly held attitudes towards the minority language Frisian in the Netherlands. A large scale matched-guise investigation was held in five locations throughout the Netherlands, including the province of Fryslân, where Frisian enjoys an official status in education and government and topdown language policy encourages usage of the minority language. The project reported upon is the first language attitude investigation to be held in a broad population group since large scale language planning and policy changes have taken place in the province. The outcomes from the attitude investigation are viewed in light of these language planning and policy changes. Our analysis indicates that the top-down language planning concerned with Frisian over the last 20 years has not brought with it more positive attitudes towards the language. These findings have implications for language planners who hope to increase the status of minority languages in Fryslân and else-