Swedish Is Beautiful, Danish Is Ugly? Investigating the Link between Language Attitudes and Spoken Word Recognition

This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a lin­ guistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by elicit­ ing language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes to­ wards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched­guise ex­ periment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the partici­ pants with 50 spoken stimuli in their neighboring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture­pointing task. Results revealed that while Danish children held more positive attitudes towards Swedish than vice versa and their word recognition scores were generally higher than those of their Swed­ ish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that the two variables are only loosely linked.