engleski

The impact of cognates in the Croatian local idiom on the development of receptive competence of Italian native speakers

In accordance with research of cross-linguistic influences occurring on the lexical level, which testifies to a greater initial comprehension of unfamiliar foreign language vocabulary on the basis of crosslinguistic similarities (Browne, 1982 ; Palmberg, 1985 ; Ringbom, 2007 ; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008 ; Rast, 2008, 2010), we have focused our interest on the role of cognates  semantically related words, sharing phonological and/or orthographic forms in two or more languages, as defined in the psycholinguistic literature (Hammer, 1975 ; Browne, 1982 ; Carroll, 1992 ; Daulton, 2008). We have examined the effect of lexical transparency of two tipologically distinct idioms - the Italian language and the Split idiom, determined by the presence of Italian loanwords in the vernacular of Split, on the initial understanding of words in the Split idiom by native speakers of Italian. Twenty high-school aged native speakers of Italian were subjected to an examination which aimed to show their level of understanding of 60 separate words from the Split idiom. Form and content were the parameters of similarity for the selection of the word samples.The examination was undertaken through the means of translation into L1 following the research conducted by Rast (2010) and Uchida (2007). The assumption of this research was that the participants would, while determining the meaning of words, use the interlinguistic information from their L1. It was also assumed that the key element in the initial understanding would be the orthographic similarity of words in the Italian language and words in the Split idiom. The acquired information testified to the abovementioned hypotheses.

crosslinguistic influences ; vocabulary ; cognates ; Italian language ; the Split idiom

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