Comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonians via knowledge of Russian
What is it about?
We have tested a success level of comprehending Ukrainian by different groups of speakers in Estonia: 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. It was established that all groups of participants were successful in understanding Ukrainian without previous exposure to it. Speakers of Estonian as L1 relied on their knowledge of Russian to understand Ukrainian and were quite succsesful. This mode we called "mediated receptive multilingualism" when understanding is possible via L3 that is closely related to the target. We detected that except for linguistic and material similarity there is a number of extra-linguistic factors that enhance comprehension such as: metalinguistic awareness, exposure to Russian, exposure to various registers, experience with multilingual situations, learnability, and attitudes towards Ukrainian.
Why is it important?
Multilingualism could exist in different forms and even passive or receptive knowledge of language is important. According to multi-competence model by Vivian Cook, multilingualism is not a mechanical sum of languages. Even a passive knowledge of a language could affect how person knows the strongest L1 that is different to knowledge of L1 by a monolingual person. Therefore, we need to look more closely not only into the formal context of language acquisition (with a teacher, etc.), but more broadly for instance, using receptive multilingualism (RM) mode or any other language modes. This study uncovers hidden potential of multilingualism that can be used to optimize comprehension. It sheds light on the mechanisms behind understanding and using foreign language receptively and adds to RM, sociolinguistics and communicative studies. Detecting factors that lead to successful comprehension and communication and eliciting language specific elements contribute to the learning theory in typological distant languages.