Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and intelligibility

This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the participants with 50 spoken stimuli in their neighboring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture-pointing 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 Swedish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that the two variables are only loosely linked

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

It 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

You Talkin' To Me? The Effect of Communication Barriers on Trust in Diverse Societies

A large body of research has found that diverse societies tend to suffer from lower levels of social trust, but the reasons for this trust deficit are still not fully clear. In this thesis, I contend that communication barriers between ethnic groups who speak different languages could be one reason for this effect. Second, I consider whether groups who speak partly-intelligible languages suffer less of a trust deficit compared to those whose languages are completely unintelligible. Using large-N datasets from the European Union and former Yugoslavia, I find that communication barriers are indeed linked to lower trust. However, the effect of speaking partly-intelligible languages is less clear. While one study found that this led to a reduced trust deficit as expected, the other produced ambiguous results. The experiment design proposed towards the end of the thesis offers a way of resolving this uncertainty