On abduction in receptive multilingualism

Berthele, Raphael

doi:10.1515/9783110239331.191

Back

Book chapter

On abduction in receptive multilingualism : evidence from cognate guessing tasks

Berthele, Raphael Université de Fribourg

2011

Published in:

Applied Linguistics Review / Li Wei. - de Gruyter. - 2011, vol. 2, p. 191-220

English This article focuses on the question how multilinguals use their languages in order to guess the meaning of cognates in unlearnt but genealogically close languages. A series of studies is discussed whose aim is to tap into this process of interlingual inferencing. Different measures for phonological and graphematic distances across languages are established and correlated with the rates of successful cognate recognition in the search for a threshold of string similarity beyond which recognition becomes unlikely. The role of different types of the participants’ multilingual repertoires is assessed, and other factors influencing good performance in cognate recognition are identified. The process of interlingual inferencing is discussed as a form of abductive reasoning, and quantitative and qualitative data are analyzed to support the idea that this type of abduction is an essential driving force in receptive multilingualism and language comprehension in general.

Faculty

Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines

Department

Département de plurilinguisme et didactique des langues étrangères

Language