The role of extra-linguistic factors in receptive bilingualism: Evidence from Danish and Swedish pre-schoolers

Abstract

Danish and Swedish are closely related languages that are generally mutually intelligible. Previous research has shown, however, that Danes comprehend more spoken Swedish than vice versa. It has been suggested that this asymmetry is caused by extra-linguistic factors such as literacy, contact with, and attitudes held towards the test language. However, also linguistic factors, such as supra-segmental features or differences in speech rate, could cause or increase an asymmetry. The aim of the experiment reported in this article was to exclude three extra-linguistic factors (attitude, contact and literacy) in order to determine their role in mutual intelligibility. Participants were 19 Danish- and 26 Swedish-speaking illiterate preschoolers. Their task was to match 50 cognate nouns to corresponding pictures in a multiple-choice task. Results revealed that word-recognition scores in Danish children (63 percent) did not differ significantly from the Swedish scores (65 percent). That means that, in contrast to adult Danes, Danish children did not perform better on the word-recognition task than their Swedish peers. This finding suggests that extra-linguistic factors play an important role in intelligibility of a closely related language, and, as extra-linguistic factors develop, the intelligibility asymmetry develops.