The Relative Contribution of Pronunciation , Lexical and Prosodic Differences to the Perceived Distances between Norwegian Dialects . Charlotte

In the period between 1999 and 2002 Jørn Almberg and Kristian Skarbø compiled a database which consists of recordings and phonetic transcriptions of translations of the fable ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ in about 50 Norwegian dialects. On the basis of 15 of these recordings Charlotte Gooskens carried out a perception experiment (see Gooskens and Heeringa, 2004). In this experiment she investigated the distances between the 15 dialects as perceived by the speakers themselves. On the basis of the phonetic transcriptions, Wilbert Heeringa (2004) measured computational linguistic distances between the 15 Norwegian varieties (see Gooskens and Heeringa, 2004). Distances were calculated by means of Levenshtein distance, which finds the minimum cost of changing one pronunciation into another by inserting, substituting or deleting phonetic segments. Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) correlated the perceptual distances with these computational distances and found a significant correlation of r=0.67. In the computational distances, pronunciation, lexical and morphological variation is processed, but these levels are not studied separately. The contribution of this paper is that we measure pronunciation, lexical and prosodic distances separately. Within pronunciation distances we distinguish between consonants and vowels on the one hand, and between substitutions and insertions/deletions on the other hand. When correlating the separate levels with perception and using multiple linear regression analyses we found that pronunciation is most important in perception and especially vowel substitutions play a major role.