A cognitively grounded measure of pronunciation distance 1

10 In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). 11 Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including 12 psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, 13 NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate 14 asymmetrical pronunciation distances. In a first study, we validated the NDL-based pronunciation 15 distances by comparing them to a large set of native-likeness ratings given by native American English 16 speakers when presented with accented English speech. In a second study, the NDL-based 17 pronunciation distances were validated on the basis of perceptual dialect distances of Norwegian 18 speakers. Results indicated that the NDL-based pronunciation distances matched perceptual distances 19 reasonably well with correlations ranging between 0.7 and 0.8. While the correlations were comparable 20 to those obtained using the Levenshtein distance, the NDL-based approach is more flexible as it is also 21 able to incorporate acoustic information other than sound segments.