Do speakers of Dutch use their knowledge of German while processing written Danish words?

Abstract

This paper elaborates on a factor that plays a role in receptive multilingualism, namely the influence of a second language (L2). We investigated whether knowledge of German can help Dutch people to decode written Danish words when they do not know any Danish. We instructed 32 participants with Dutch as a native language (L1) and different levels of proficiency in German as an L2 to translate 42 written Danish words into Dutch. The results showed that participants with a higher level of German performed better on this translation task. Furthermore, our data provides evidence for the existence of a 'foreign language mode' , i.e. the knowledge of German as an L2 seems to take over from the knowledge of the L1 if the participants' proficiency in German is high.

L2 knowledge facilitating L3 learning: the role of Russian linguistic factors in understanding of Ukrainian by Estonians

“…Since the C-test tests lexical and grammatical knowledge, this result suggests that speakers made use of more than just their lexical and grammatical knowledge of L2 Russian to understand L3 Ukrainian. This is in line with the results outlined in Swarte et al (2013), who report that the influence of L2 proficiency on L3 understanding is smaller when words are placed in sentential contexts. Context provides additional clues for participants to identify the correct semantics, avoid false friends, etc.…”

“…This mode of using a passively mastered language is known as Receptive Multilingualism and for various reasons, such as efficiency or fairness, it may be a preferred language choice pattern in specific settings. The phenomenon of reaching understanding in an L3 through the medium of an L2 has been investigated in constellations of typologically related languages, for instance, Dutch-German-Danish (Swarte et al 2013) or Czech-Polish-Slovak-Sorbian (Sloboda, Brankačkec 2014). Our study builds on this tradition, but concerns a situation in which the L1 is unrelated to L2 and L3.…”

Web-based experiments in mediated receptive multilingualism

“…In our investigation L3 and L2 are (closely) related languages and neighbors in the L2 may be responsible for a negative transfer (cf. Swarte et al 2013), i.e., cases where information from L2 is falsely transferred and leads to mistakes in understanding of the L3. It is interesting to mention here that the L1 (German) and other known languages Lx (i.e., English) may also be responsible for wrong translation in the experiment.…”

The role of language exposure in mediated receptive multilingualism

“…In this study, we explore comprehension as a stage that may precede more encompassing linguistic competence. Extensive previous research on multilingualism asserts that even minimal exposure to target language, implicit knowledge of another language closely related to the target language, and perceived proximity between these languages jointly contribute to third language acquisition (in addition to the above cited works, also Gooskens 2007a;Gooskens et al 2008;Bahtina-Jantsikene 2013;Swarte et al 2013;Kaivapalu 2015;Branets et al 2019;Branets & Backus 2020).…”

“…However, the contribution of lexical and grammatical profi ciency in Russian should not be overestimated when it comes to the general understanding of Ukrainian texts. Indeed, language profi ciency tests capture only one aspect of linguistic profi ciency, while there are also extra-linguistic factors that play a role as for example, language exposure (Branets & Backus 2020; see also especially the studies conducted in the frame of the MICReLa project, such as Gooskens et al 2015;Swarte et al 2013;Gooskens & Heeringa 2014;Schüppert & Gooskens 2010, etc.). Th e same suggestion has been made in a series of other RM studies (Gooskens & Swarte 2007;Verschik 2012;Bahtina-Jantsikene 2013;Berthele & Wittlin 2013).…”