Title: Is spoken Danish intrinsically unintelligible? Article Type: SI-Non-native Speech Perception

Abstract: The most straightforward way to explain why Danes understand spoken Swedish relatively better than Swedes understand spoken Danish would be that spoken Danish is intrinsically a more difficult language to understand than spoken Swedish. We present circumstantial evidence suggesting that Danish is intrinsically poorly intelligible, and the report on a formal experiment in which we tested the intelligibility of Danish and Swedish materials spoken by three representative male speakers per language (isolated cognate and non-cognate words, words in semantically unpredictable sentences, words in spontaneous interaction in maptasks) presented in descending levels of noise to native listeners of Danish (N = 18) and Swedish (N = 24), respectively. The results show that Danish is as intelligible to Danish listeners as Swedish is to Swedish listeners. In a separate task, the same listeners recognized the same materials (presented without noise) in the neighboring language. The asymmetry that has traditionally been claimed was indeed found. Possible reasons for the asymmetry are discussed. The most straightforward way to explain why Danes understand spoken Swedish relatively better than Swedes understand spoken Danish would be that spoken Danis