The influence of extra-linguistic factors on mutual intelligibility: Some preliminary results from Danish and Swedish pre-schoolers.

Communication between speakers of the closely related Scandinavian languages often takes place in the language of the speaker rather than in English as a lingua franca. Also scientifically, it has been shown that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible to a large extent in adults (Bo 1978, Delsing & Lundin-Akesson 2005, Maurud 1976). However, in previous investigations, mutual intelligibility between Danish and Swedish has been shown to be asymmetrical: Danes have fewer problems decoding Swedish than Swedes have decoding Danish. A number of factors have been suggested to cause the asymmetry in spoken language (Bo 1978, Delsing & Lundin-Akesson 2005, Gooskens 2006, Gooskens & Doetjes accepted, Maurud 1976). These factors can be divided into linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Linguistic factors are language-inherent features of the language itself, such as supra-segmental features, average word length, and speech tempo. Danish and Swedish have common roots, but differ in many of these respects. Still, in previous research, mostly extra-linguistic factors have been considered to cause the asymmetry in mutual intelligibility between these two languages. We hypothesize that the asymmetry is mainly caused by linguistic factors. The aim of the experiment reported in this paper was therefore to exclude the influence of extra-linguistic factors on mutual intelligibility (see Section 2), and to compare our intelligibility scores to scores from previous studies, that have not done so. To place our experiment in perspective, we will start by giving an overview of the three mainly discussed extra-linguistic factors.