Read "Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian" by outstanding @byureka (@PuzzleOfDanish), testing the hypothesis that Danish's reduction of consonants makes Danes more reliant on context 1/n
psyarxiv.com/jpbtw/
The team (also involving Højen, @kristian_tylen, @MH_Christiansen and me) cleverly tweaked categorical perception paradigms to compare how native speakers of Danish and of Bokmål Norwegian (akin to Danish, but with less reduction) combine acoustic information from the phoneme 2/n
with semantic information from the sentence containing the word. Using Drift Diffusion Models (with tips from @HenrikSingmann) to combine response and reaction times @byureka shows native speakers of Danish wait longer for relevant context and rely more on it than Norwegians 3/n
To investigate whether this was an actual cognitive difference (e.g. native speakers of Danish have a better trained acoustic working memory) or a different strategy, @byureka followed up with a new study forcing participants to wait for the end of the sentence 4/n
Native speakers of Norwegian start behaving like Danes (and Danes are weird as usual). Special kudos for the clever experimental design, mechanism-oriented thinking, nuanced computational modeling skills and open science attitude to @byureka (osf.io/qcjgt/)
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