Phonological Schematicity in Interscandinavian Decoding

Generations of linguists have been intrigued by intercommunication as it can be observed between speakers of the closely related languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Although interlocutors typically struggle with this multilingual mode of communication at first, they quickly learn to deal with the phonologically deviant input. It has long been hypothesized that one of the key mechanisms in intercommunicative decoding is the identification of systematic phonological correspondences between the languages involved. In investigating the associated learning process from a constructionist point of view, the book tackles a long-standing research gap in Interscandinavian communication research and at the same time attends to an aspect that remains largely unexplored in constructionist research: The representation of phonological variability. The study results discussed in the book provide indications that speakers are extremely responsive to phonological variability, suggesting that information about phonological differences and commonalities between varieties forms an essential part of our linguistic knowledge.