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Lexical inferencing and the mutual intelligibility of Estonian and Finnish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2017

Pirkko Muikku-Werner
Pirkko Muikku-Werner*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu Campus, P.O. Box 111, FI-80101 Joensuu, Finland. [email protected]
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Abstract

Several factors affect the comprehension of a text written in a language related to the reader's first language (L1): (i) orthographic similarity with the reader's L1, (ii) contextual clues, (iii) semantic relationships between components of phraseological units, and (iv) L1 reading comprehension strategies. This article compares the results of a cloze test (CT), in which a group of Finns read a text in their L1 (Finnish) and filled the gaps, and a translation test (TT), in which another group of Finns translated the Estonian version of the same text into Finnish. This text included five pairs of primes and targets, parts of the same phraseological unit, representing different semantic relations; in the CT the target was replaced by a gap and in the TT the respondents had to translate the target. The results indicated that the respondents used similar inferencing strategies in both tests, and thus provide evidence for the assumption that orthographic similarity is not the sole factor contributing to understanding a foreign text, but that L1 reading comprehension strategies are also employed.

Keywords

EstonianFinnishphraseological unitreceptive multilingualismsemantic priming
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 40 , Special Issue 2: Receptive Multilingualism , October 2017 , pp. 201 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2017 

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