Linguistic Determinants of the Intelligibility of Swedish Words among Danes

Kürschner, Sebastian; Gooskens, Charlotte; Bezooijen, Renée van

doi:10.1017/upo9780748641642.006

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Linguistic features that seemed to make the cognates less transparent to the Finnish participants were 1) the loss of a word-final vowel in Estonian, 2) word structure that can be interpreted as morpheme + inflectional morpheme, and 3) Estonian sounds that do not exist in Finnish. Kürschner et al (2009) got similar results when they studied how well Danish speakers understand Swedish words. They found that phonetic distance between the cognates affected the intelligibility the most.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

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Mutual intelligibility of Finnish and Estonian vocabulary

Härmävaara

Gooskens

2019

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This paper reports on an investigation on Finnish-Estonian mutual intelligibility carried out by means of a word translation task among 307 Finnish and 118 Estonian participants. The results confirm previous findings by Kaivapalu (2015) that both in the spoken and in the written mode Estonians understand isolated words in Finnish better than Finns understand isolated words in Estonian. Older participants performed better than younger participants.Many of the participants had at least some previous exposure to the test language and were therefore familiar with some words and sound correspondences. However, we were also interested in testing how well speakers of the two languages could understand the other language purely on the basis of the similarity of the languages. We therefore separately analyzed the data produced by a subset of participants with no or little exposure to the test language. The results were still asymmetric, but only in the spoken mode. We looked at various linguistic and non-linguistic factors that could explain why some cognates are more easily recognized than others.To put our results into perspective, we compared them to the results of the similar experiments involving 70 Germanic, Romance and Slavic language combinations.

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Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

“…The stem vowel of rühm is -a, which makes the genitive and partitive form rühma, and the forms based on the genitive stem, more similar to the Finnish forms. cause confusion in word identification (Kürschner et al 2009;Kaivapalu & Martin 2014).…”

Section: Number Of Syllablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutual intelligibility of Finnish and Estonian vocabulary

Härmävaara

Gooskens

2019

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“…Brought to you by | Florida International University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 5/29/15 3:15 AM 2011; Kürschner et al 2008;Möller 2010;Möller and Zeevaert 2010;Van Heuven 2008). An interesting line of further inquiry concerns the interactions between the participant-related linguistic and cognitive variables discussed in this paper on the one hand and such stimulus-related characteristics on the other hand.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…1 The profile words were included to allow us to verify whether the participants did indeed not have any substantial prior lexical knowledge of Swedish. We decided a priori that any participant able to translate more than two profile words in a given block correctly was to be excluded from the analysis (for a similar filtering function of non-cognates in a cognate guessing task, see Kürschner et al 2008).…”

Section: Cognate Guessing Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lifespan development of cognate guessing skills in an unknown related language

Vanhove

Berthelé

2015

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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This study investigates the lifespan development of the ability to correctly guess the meaning of foreign-language words with known translationequivalent cognates. It also aims to identify the cognitive and linguistic factors driving this development. To this end, 159 German-speaking Swiss participants aged 10 to 86 were asked to translate 45 written and 45 spoken isolated Swedish words with German, English or French cognates. In addition, they were administered an English language test, a German vocabulary test as well as fluid intelligence and working memory tests. Cognate guessing skills were found to improve into young adulthood, but whereas they show additional increases in the written modality throughout adulthood, they start to decrease from age 50 onwards for spoken stimuli. Congruently with these findings, L1 vocabulary knowledge is a stronger predictor of written cognate guessing success, whereas fluid intelligence is the most important predictor in the spoken modality. Raw data and computer code used for the analyses are freely available online.

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Linguistic Determinants of the Intelligibility of Swedish Words among Danes

Cited by 2 publications

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Mutual intelligibility of Finnish and Estonian vocabulary

Mutual intelligibility of Finnish and Estonian vocabulary

The lifespan development of cognate guessing skills in an unknown related language

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