Phonetic Cues in Auditory Identification of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian Language of Origin.

This article investigates the ability of lay native speakers of four Slavic languages—Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian—to identify the linguistic origin of speakers based solely on auditory samples of pseudowords (logatomes) with limited segmental and suprasegmental information. The study found that word stress position did not significantly influence recognition accuracy, whereas vowel characteristics such as duration and vowel space overlap (measured by Pillai scores) correlated with listeners’ performance. Additionally, listeners’ fluency in related and some non-Slavic languages affected identification accuracy, with native speakers generally better at recognizing their own language and closely related ones. An information-theoretic measure of surprisal (logatome identification surprisal, LIS) showed a negative but statistically insignificant correlation with recognition scores. The findings support the involvement of untrained native speakers in Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO) procedures, especially when linguistic data are limited, highlighting humans’ capacity to identify linguistic origin from highly reduced acoustic cues.