September 9, 2003

Mutual intelligibility  

Language Hat links to this somewhat surprising discovery (the paper itself is here) about accents and interpreting foreign languages. Apparently it's just as easy for non-native speakers of a language to understand other non-native spekers (ie people with accents) as it is for them to understand natives. This makes sense if you're talking about one language - just last week I noticed how much easier it was to understand my sister than her Italian boyfriend, even though they were both speaking Italian pretty fast, with dropped consonants etc, but this makes sense because my sister and I are both native English speakers, so we might both have a similar relationship with Italian. But according to the article, the increased intelligibility applies even when the non-native speakers come different native languages - a possibly significant result in terms of clarifying the way one person understands another.

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