Mediated receptive multilingualism

Abstract

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.

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

“…An earlier study (Branets et al 2019) reported that in experimental settings participants (ethnic Russians from Russia who recently have moved to Estonia, local Russians with Russian as L1 and Estonian as L2, simultaneous/early Estonian-Russian bilinguals and speakers of Estonian as L1 with B1 and B2 proficiency in Russian) were indeed quite successful in understanding Ukrainian without previous exposure. Interestingly, participants who reported less advanced knowledge of Russian e.g.…”

“…The participants are speakers of Estonian as L1. The experiment is a part of a larger study discussed in Branets, Bahtina and Verschik (2019). The aims of this paper are to verify whether the participants' performance on the C-test in Russian indeed predicted their results on the two Ukrainian tasks, and to see which aspects of Russian turned out to be difficult for the participants, and therefore unlikely to be of much help in understanding Ukrainian.…”

“…The experiment consisted of a socio-linguistic questionnaire (Bahtina-Jantsikene 2013), a C-test (Grotjahn 1987), tasks testing the understanding of Ukrainian words (Shumarova 2000) and of Ukrainian text as a whole (Gooskens 2013), and a debriefing session also used to collect participants' comments about their choices. The experiment is part of a larger study, presented in Branets et al (2019).…”

“…The experiment was conducted in Tallinn in 2017-2018, with 30 speakers of Estonian as L1 with B1 or B2 proficiency in Russian. Based on the results from an earlier pilot study with three respondents, B1 was selected as the lowest proficiency in Russian that was sufficient for completing the Ukrainian tasks (Branets et al 2019). The sample included 10 male and 20 female participants, and all were residents of Tallinn at the moment of testing.…”

Visual vs. Auditory Perception of Bulgarian Stimuli by Russian Native Speakers

“…when they have learnt the respective language [Gooskens 2019]. An acquired lingua receptiva can apply to less related or unrelated languages, too [Muikku-Werner 2014], and this is also known as mediated receptive multilingualism [Branets et al 2019] which eases understanding between typologically distant languages through the medium of a language closely related to the target.…”