Lenition and the asymmetry in mutual intelligibility of Danish and Swedish

This thesis focuses on the asymmetrical mutual intelligibility relation of Danish and Swedish, combining production and perception of native and non-native sounds to investigate the role of lenition and phonetic dissimilarities between languages in mutual intelligibility. In the first chapter I give an outline of the previous literature on mutual intelligibility (section 1.1), lenition (section 1.2), and Danish intervocalic lenition (section 1.3). In chapter 2 I formulate research questions and hypotheses on the experiments, which I describe in chapter 3 and 4. Chapter 3 is a chapter on production, describing the phonetic analysis of Danish and Swedish sounds (more specifically: pre- and intervocalic stops) after which I formulate more detailed predictions on the subsequent chapter (chapter 4) on perception. In chapter 4 I describe a perception experiment with Danish and Swedish participants, of which I link the results with the results of the production experiment in the general discussion in chapter 5. This thesis shows that Danish intervocalic lenition is not a factor in the Danish-Swedish asymmetrical intelligibility relation. Furthermore, the results show that perception of non-native sounds seems to be guided by different mechanisms than perception of native sounds.