Sources of Intelligibility of Distant Languages: An Empirical Study.
Research into iconicity, systematicity, and sound-symbolism has revealed that the connection between linguistic form and meaning is not completely arbitrary. In the present study, native Czech speakers, unfamiliar with Hindi, were presented with a task in which they had to match Hindi words with the...
| Publicado en: | Language & Speech Vol. 69; no. 2; pp. 505 - 535 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
| Formato: | equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
Sage Publications Inc.
Jun2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=193982620&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 193982620 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 00238309 3YY jtl: Language & Speech issn: 00238309 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jun2026 vid: 69 iid: 2 pid: 344 pub: Sage Publications Inc. place: Thousand Oaks, California artinfo: ui: 193982620 186551739 193982620 193982620 10.1177/00238309251345952 193982620 ppf: 505 ppct: 30 formats: tig: atl: Sources of Intelligibility of Distant Languages: An Empirical Study. aug: au: Milička, Jiří Marklová, Anna Láznička, Michal Diatka, Vojtěch Bednářová, Hana Matela, Jiří Škrabal, Michal affil: Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Czech Republic sug: subj: Speech Intelligibility Linguistics Task Performance and Analysis Czechs Speech Perception Human Funding Source Empirical Research Czech Republic Word Lists Language Psycholinguistics India Japan Latvia Turkiye Descriptive Statistics Confidence Intervals Male Female Logistic Regression Phonetics Male Female ab: Research into iconicity, systematicity, and sound-symbolism has revealed that the connection between linguistic form and meaning is not completely arbitrary. In the present study, native Czech speakers, unfamiliar with Hindi, were presented with a task in which they had to match Hindi words with their corresponding Czech translations. The words were randomly selected from a Hindi corpus. Despite the considerable linguistic gap between the two languages, the analysis showed that the Czech participants were able to accurately discern the meanings of approximately 60% of the Hindi word pairs, surpassing the 50% success rate that would be expected by random guessing alone. This experiment was subsequently replicated using Turkish, Japanese, and Latvian words, demonstrating the robustness of this phenomenon across different languages. In the case of a closer language like Latvian, the success rate reached 80%. However, even a distant language such as Japanese reached the 60% success level. Furthermore, the study explored potential factors influencing intelligibility. Data collected from a total of 1,128 participants found that the phonological similarity of Czech words and their translation, word length alignment, presence of cognates, and the way the trials were presented had a significant effect on the success rate of guessing the correct translation across all four languages. In addition, language-specific effects were identified. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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