The paper studies the use of the passive voice in academic texts written in Mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) by their native speakers and by adult Polish learners of those languages. The corpus consists of 37 MA theses written in Scandinavia and in Poland. A number of referring verbs were chosen for the purpose of the analysis. The results show that while there are discrepancies in the use of the passive voice in texts written by Polish and Scandinavian students, they cannot be unequivocally diagnosed as resulting from the grammatical and stylistic influence of the mother tongue.

The main objective of the study was to test the applicability of Bent and Bradlow’s matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit to the Danish-Polish language pair. We aimed to verify whether it was easier for Polish students of Danish to understand a Danish native speaker or a Polish speaker with a proficient command of Danish. Sixteen Polish students, divided into two groups of eight, listened to two recordings of two Danish texts: one recorded by a native speaker of Danish and the other one — by a native speaker of Polish who is a graduate of Danish philology from a Polish university. Before the experiment, all of the recordings were evaluated in terms of traces of foreign accent using a 7-point Likert scale, the experts being native speakers of Danish. The evaluators assessed the Polish native speaker’s pronunciation as proficient, but they identified certain segmental and suprasegmental features in his speech that are common indicators of a foreign accent in Danish. During the experiment, participants were asked to fill in each recording transcript with twenty missing words. The analysis of the results revealed that the participants scored higher when listening to the text recorded by the Polish speaker. Hence, the matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit was observed in a study using Polish as L1 (native language) and Danish as a foreign language. The study may provide a valuable insight into the question of non-native speech perception, foreign-accented speech and the veracity of the matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for the Polish–Danish language pair.

lology after the first year of study, and they come from different learner groups over the last 20 years. There is some variation across the learner groups in terms of both learnerand task-related variables, and I apply a number of complexity indices to examine the traces of these variables in the syntax of the analyzed texts. I focus on differences across learner groups, text genres and the authors' gender.

The acquisition of the Danish sound system can be a difficult task for both native and non-native speakers. This paper is an attempt at showing the ways in which /r/ contributes to the system's overall complexity. It is suggested that /r/-related difficulties in Danish are due to the impact /r/ has on the neighboring sounds and, as a result, on the relations between graphemes, phonemes and sounds. Several phenomena connected with the presence of /r/ in various contexts are presented to exemplify the above statement, including r-coloring (i.e. the change of the quality of the neighboring vowel), the fusion of /r/ with neighboring vowels and the interactions between /r/ and /ə/, resulting in a change of vowel length and/or the assimilation of [ə]. The analysis focuses mainly on the grapheme-sound relations and the ways /r/ affects the discrepancy between Danish orthography and pronunciation.