Phonetic and Lexical Predictors of Intelligibility

In the present investigation, the intelligibility of 17 Scandinavian language varieties (including 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.