Chaoju Tang|Vincent J. van Heuven
Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested
Leiden University|Chongqing Jiaotong University|Leiden University
argue mutual intelligibility testing adequate way determine different two languages language varieties tested mutual intelligibility 15 chinese dialects functionally level isolated words wordintelligibility level sentences sentence intelligibility collected data dialect playing isolated words sentences spoken 15 chinese dialects 15 listeners wordintelligibility determined listeners perform semantic categorization task whereby words classified one ten different categories body part plant animal etc sentence intelligibility estimated listeners translate target word sentence dialect obtained 47250 data 15 150 15 word part 15 60 15 sentence part also disposal structural similarity measures lexical similarity phonological correspondence pair 15 chinese dialects published cheng computational linguistics chinese language processing 1997 21 pp 4172 general conclusion degree mutual intelligibility determined opinion functional tests two subjective measures significantly correlated one another predicted objective measures lexical similarity phonological correspondence equally well however functional intelligibility measures especially sentence level better reflect chinese dialect classifications opinion scores