Limited common ground, unlimited communicative success: an experimental study into Lingua Receptiva using Estonian and Russian

Bahtina-Jantsikene, Daria; Backus, Ad

doi:10.22601/pet.2016.01.03

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…Various communication strategies in RM towards reaching comprehension have been attested, such as accommodation or reducing linguistic differences (Giles et al1991, Hlavac 2014) or hearer's and speaker's metacommunicative practices that are provided naturally by the assistance of interlocutors to each other during a conversation in complex multilingual situations (Bahtina-Jantsikene & Backus 2016). In RM, the context and multimodal elements of interaction play an important role (Härmävaara & Gooskens 2019: 19, Muikku-Werner 2014.…”

Section: Theoretical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonians via Russian: Structural and extra-linguistic aspects

Branets

Verschik

2021

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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This study explores how people use and expand their linguistic resources in the situation when they have some proficiency in L2 and try to understand L3 that is related to L2. The focus of the study is on the comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonian L1 speakers via their proficiency in Russian (L2). This situation is labeled as mediated receptive multilingualism. The aim of this research is to investigate the role of cross-linguistic similarity (objective or perceived, in the terms of Ringbom 2007) and extra-linguistic predictors of success in comprehension. In addition to measuring the success rate, we pay attention to the participant's perspective. The experiment was conducted with 30 speakers of Estonian as L1 and included a questionnaire, C-test in Russian, three Ukrainian texts with different groups of tasks, and debriefing. In this article, we focus on the task of defining Ukrainian words from the text and on debriefing interviews. The results showed that similarity, perceived or objective, is not the only decisive factor in facilitating understanding. The participants explanations confirmed our previous findings that similarity, albeit important, is only partly responsible for successful comprehension. This became clear from the debriefing interviews. In many cases, the participants' choice was affected by a range of extra-linguistic factors: general knowledge, context, exposure to various registers of Russian, M-factor, meta-linguistic awareness, and learnability. In some instances, context and general knowledge outweighed similarity. These findings show how similarity worked together with extra-linguistic factors in facilitating successful comprehension in challenging multilingual settings.

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Section: Theoretical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonians via Russian: Structural and extra-linguistic aspects

Branets

Verschik

2021

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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Complexity matching and lexical matching in monolingual and bilingual conversations

et al. 2019

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When people interact, aspects of their speech and language patterns often converge in interactions involving one or more languages. Most studies of speech convergence in conversations have examined monolingual interactions, whereas most studies of bilingual speech convergence have examined spoken responses to prompts. However, it is not uncommon in multilingual communities to converse in two languages, where each speaker primarily produces only one of the two languages. The present study examined complexity matching and lexical matching as two measures of speech convergence in conversations spoken in English, Spanish, or both languages. Complexity matching measured convergence in the hierarchical timing of speech, and lexical matching measured convergence in the frequency distributions of lemmas produced. Both types of matching were found equally in all three language conditions. Taken together, the results indicate that convergence is robust to monolingual and bilingual interactions because it stems from basic mechanisms of coordination and communication.

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Mediated receptive multilingualism

Branets

Bahtina

Verschik

2019

LAB

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This article introduces and defines the concept of mediated receptive multilingualism as a mode of multilingual communication which eases understanding between typologically distant languages through the medium of a language closely related to the target. In an experimental setting, Estonians without previous exposure to Ukrainian were quite successful in understanding Ukrainian texts via their knowledge of Russian. As expected, they made use of various language-specific elements to improve intelligibility, such as linguistic similarities between Russian and Ukrainian. However, a number of extra-linguistic factors were detected as influential predictors of success, especially metalinguistic awareness, exposure to Russian, exposure to various registers, experience with multilingual situations, learnability, and attitudes towards Ukrainian. These findings contest a static take on multilingual potential and point out the emergent nature of competencies and practices that become relevant in multilingual settings. Unconventional communicative modes – like mediated receptive multilingualism – may activate linguistic and sociolinguistic resources needed for establishing understanding in novel and potentially challenging communicative settings.

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Limited common ground, unlimited communicative success: an experimental study into Lingua Receptiva using Estonian and Russian

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

Comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonians via Russian: Structural and extra-linguistic aspects

Comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonians via Russian: Structural and extra-linguistic aspects

Complexity matching and lexical matching in monolingual and bilingual conversations

Mediated receptive multilingualism

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