Online activation of L1 Danish orthography enhances spoken word recognition of Swedish

Anja Schüppert,Charlotte Gooskens,Johannes C Ziegler,Holger Juul

doi:10.1017/s0332586521000056

Abstract

AbstractIt has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.

Highlights

1.1 Mutual intelligibility between Danish and Swedish Danish and Swedish are closely related languages that have been shown to be mutually intelligible to a large extent
Their findings reveal that orthographically related items were harder to categorise as semantically unrelated than orthographically unrelated items. This suggests that participants activate their orthographic knowledge during spoken word recognition of Chinese. These findings indicate that native orthography is involved in native spoken word recognition
Reaction times (RTs) were measured from stimulus onset to response offset, i.e. until the participants hit the enter key after having typed the translation

Summary

Introduction

1.1 Mutual intelligibility between Danish and Swedish Danish and Swedish are closely related languages that have been shown to be mutually intelligible to a large extent. There is evidence, that mutual intelligibility is asymmetric in that Danish-speaking listeners understand more spoken language items when they are confronted with Swedish than Swedish-speaking listeners do when they are confronted with spoken Danish (Maurud 1976, Bø 1978, Delsing & Lundin Åkesson 2005). To explore this asymmetry in mutual intelligibility, Hilton, Schüppert & Gooskens (2011) investigated differences in articulation rates in a comparative study of spoken Danish and Swedish. The high frequency of mismatches between Danish orthography and Danish pronunciation results in low print-to-speech and speech-to-print predictability, and in high orthographic depth (Schmalz et al 2015)

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