Resumen de Predicting mutual intelligibility among Chinese dialects from subjective and objective linguistic similarity measures

Chaoju Tang

• We determined subjective mutual intelligibility and linguistic similarity by presenting recordings of the same spoken passage in 15 Chinese dialects to naive listeners of the same set of dialects and asking them to rate the dialects along both subjective dimensions. We then regressed the subjective ratings against objective structural similarity measures (lexical, phonological) for the same set of dialects as published in the literature. Our results show that subjective distance is better predicted than subjective mutual intelligibility and that the relationship between objective and subjective measures is logarithmic. Best predicted was log-transformed subjective similarity (excluding the Beijing dialect, which is identical to the standard language) with R2 = .64.