Predicting mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects from multiple objective linguistic distance measures

Abstract

This paper predicts the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects from multiple objective distance measures. Empirical mutual intelligibility measures were obtained from functional intelligibility tests at the sentence level from 15 listeners for each of 15 Chinese dialects. We computed various proximity measures on the basis of shared phonemes and tones in the sound inventories of the 15 dialects. Next, Levenshtein (string-edit) distance measures were computed on the 764 common syllabic units (zi in Pinyin, i.e., a meaningful character or morpheme with a complete transcription of segments and tone) shared by the same 15 Chinese dialects in the Dialect Sound Database of Modern Chinese (compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). Unweighted and perceptually weighted Levenshtein distance measures were computed. We also included objective similarity measures of phonological correspondence, based on the Zihui character list and of lexical affinity, based on the Cihui cross-dialect lexical database with all cognate and non-cognate expressions of 905 core concepts) that have been published by Cheng (1997). The best single predictor of mutual intelligibility between a pair of dialects was the percentage of cognates shared between them (r² = .548). Including all predictors afforded a highly accurate prediction of mutual intelligibility (R² = .874). A very reasonable prediction is afforded if we just add the lexical frequency of finals (syllable rhymes) shared by a pair of dialects (R² = .611).