Testing Procedures for Estimating Transfer of Information among Iroquois Dialects and Languages

Hickerson, Harold; Turner, Glen D.; Hickerson, Nancy P.

doi:10.1086/464140

Cited by 25 publications

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“…This method was first used for native American languages (Voegelin and Harris 1951;Hickerson, Turner and Hickerson 1952;Olmsted 1954). 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.…”

Section: How To Measure Mutual Intelligibility?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

Golubović

Gooskens

2015

Russ Linguist

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In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West Slavic languages are more intelligible among speakers of West Slavic languages than among those of South Slavic languages. We found an asymmetry in Croatian-Slovene intelligibility, whereby Slovene speakers can understand written and spoken Croatian better than vice versa. Finally, we compared the three methods and found that the word translation task and the cloze test give very similar results, while the results of the picture task are somewhat unreliable.Аннотация В настоящей статье рассматривается вопрос взаимопонимания между тремя западнославянскими (чешским, словацким и польским) и тремя южнославян-скими (хорватским, словенским и болгарским) языками. В исследовании использова-лись три различных метода: задание перевода слов, тестовое задание с заполнением пробелов и изобразительное задание. Результаты теста показывают, что в большинстве случаев разделение между западнославянскими и южнославянскими языками сущест-вует. При этом западнославянские языки-более близки между собой в смысле пони-мания для их носителей, в то время как у носителей южнославянских языков такое взаимопонимание затруднено. В результате исследования была выявлена асимметрия в отношении словенского и хорватского языков: носители словенского языка лучше понимают хорватскую письменную и устную речь, чем наоборот. Подытоживая экспе-римент, мы сопоставили три использованных нами метода и установили, что задание на перевод слов и задание на заполнение пробелов дают сходные результаты, в то время как результат изобразительного задания оказался менее надежным.

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Section: How To Measure Mutual Intelligibility?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

Golubović

Gooskens

2015

Russ Linguist

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“…Early attempts at establishing mutual intelligibility among related languages were made by American structuralists around 1950, trying to establish mutual intelligibility among related Amerindian languages (Voegelin and Harris, 1951;Hickerson et al, 1952;Pierce, 1952). The method was standardized and is still often used in the context of literacy programs, where a single orthography has to be developed that serves multiple closely related language varieties (Casad, 1974;Brye and Brye, 2000;Anderson, 2005).…”

Section: Linguistic Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested

Tang

Heuven

2009

Lingua

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We argue that mutual intelligibility testing is an adequate way to determine how different two languages or language varieties are. We tested the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects functionally at the level of isolated words (word-intelligibility) and the level of sentences (sentence intelligibility). We collected data for each dialect by playing isolated words and sentences spoken in 15 Chinese dialects to 15 listeners. Word-intelligibility was determined by having listeners perform a semantic categorization task whereby words had to be classified as one of ten different categories such as body part, plant, animal, etc. Sentence intelligibility was estimated by having the listeners translate a target word in each sentence into their own dialect. We obtained 47,250 data (15 Â 150 Â 15 for the word part and 15 Â 60 Â 15 for the sentence part). We also had at our disposal structural similarity measures (lexical similarity, phonological correspondence) for each pair of the 15 Chinese dialects published by Cheng (Computational Linguistics & Chinese Language Processing 1997, 2.1, pp. 41-72). Our general conclusion is that the degree of mutual intelligibility can be determined by both opinion and functional tests. These two subjective measures are significantly correlated with one another and can be predicted from objective measures (lexical similarity and phonological correspondence) equally well. However, functional intelligibility measures, especially at the sentence level, better reflect Chinese dialect classifications than opinion scores. #

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“…This assumption is along the lines of the argumentation of a relatively neglected area of linguistic research, receptive multilingualism. Studies in receptive multilingualism, which is defined as ‘the language constellation in which interlocutors use their respective mother tongues while speaking to each other’ (Zeevaert & ten Thije, 2007: 1), in fact, go back to the 1950s when Hickerson, Turner, & Hickerson (1952) aimed to discover the degree to which members of a given speech community, Iraquois dialects in their study, can understand the utterances of members of another. Following this study, Wolff (1959) studied the mutual intelligibility of American Indian languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Receptive multilingualism and language understanding: Intelligibility of Azerbaijani to Turkish speakers

Sağın-Şimşek

König

2011

International Journal of Bilingualism

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This article presents an investigation of language understanding within the framework of receptive multilingualism. That Turkish and Azerbaijani are closely related languages within the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages leads to the assumption that Turkish and Azerbaijani are mutually intelligible languages. That is, speakers of these two different languages of Turkic origin can comprehend each other without much difficulty. This article aims to consider whether these languages are, in fact, as mutually intelligible as estimated, especially on the part of the Turkish speakers. In other words, within the framework of this study, the focus is on how well Turkish speakers understand written and spoken Azerbaijani. In addition, the study asks whether there is any risk of understanding failure on the part of Turkish speakers and, if yes, it will examine the grounds of such understanding failure. The results of this study in which 30 Turkish participants took part show that even though Turkish and Azerbaijani are typologically similar languages, on the part of Turkish speakers the intelligibility is not as high as is estimated.

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Testing Procedures for Estimating Transfer of Information among Iroquois Dialects and Languages

Cited by 25 publications

References 0 publications

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested

Receptive multilingualism and language understanding: Intelligibility of Azerbaijani to Turkish speakers

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