Scharpff & Van Heuven (1988) have shown that low-quality, synthetic speech is
better understood when pauses are inserted at prosodic boundaries. Their study
pertains to an L1 situation. In the present paper we test the hypothesis that the
positive effect of particular pauses on intelligibility… read more
In the present study we quantitatively examine similarly constructed samples of formal spoken Swedish and Dutch in order to compare the composition of the lexicons. Results showed that Swedish has many more loans than Dutch, namely 44.4% against 27.9%. Within the Swedish loans there is a large… read more
West Frisian is an indigenous minority language situated in the north of the Netherlands. The majority language is Dutch. Both languages traditionally have an alveolar [r]. However, during the last century Dutch has acquired two other variants of /r/, namely uvular [r] and approximant [r]. We… read more
The three West-Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are so closely related that they can be expected to be mutually intelligible to a large extent. In the present investigation, we established the intelligibility of written Afrikaans and Frisian by Dutch-speaking subjects. It appeared… read more
Abstract. This experimental study deals with the perception of regionally colored accents of Standard Dutch (from Groningen, Friesland, Limburg, Zuid-Holland, and West-Flanders) as compared to 'pure' Standard Dutch. Three different aspects were investigated: speech-based personality impression,… read more