Phonetic and Lexical Predictors of Intelligibility

Abstract

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.

Do speakers of Dutch use their knowledge of German while processing written Danish words?

“…Th is was established by calculating the orthographic distance between each Danish stimulus word and its Dutch or German cognate by means of a Levenshtein distance. Th e Levenshtein procedure is based on the number of steps (inserting, deleting or substituting a character) that has to be taken to go from one (in this case) orthographic form to the other (Gooskens, Heeringa & Beijering 2008). Figure 2 shows an example of this procedure.…”

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

“…The task is quite intuitive and akin to a real-life situation, but since the participants only retell the content, it is extremely difficult to score such a task in a valid and reliable fashion. • A related type of method to the previous one is the sentence translation task, in which the participants read or listen to a text sentence by sentence and then translate every single word they read (or heard) (Gooskens, Heeringa and Beijering 2008). The scoring problem of the retelling tasks is partly solved by counting the number of correctly translated words.…”

Measuring Foreign Accent Strength in English

“…Sanders and Chin (2009) use a version of the LD to measure the atypicalness of the speech of users of cochlear implants. In a study with aims similar to the present one, Gooskens, Beijering and Heeringa (2008) show that a LD based on segment distances derived from canonical spectrograms and normalized for length correlates highly with intelligibility (r = -0.86). We interpret their results, too, as a validation of Levenshtein distance as a measure of pronunciation dissimilarity.…”