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Mental representations in receptive multilingualism
Edited by Bonnie C. Holmes and Michael T. Putnam
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:3] 2020
► pp. 380–411

Mediated receptive multilingualism

Estonian-Russian-Ukrainian case study

| Tallinn University, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
| Helsinki University, University of California, Los Angeles
| Tallinn University

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.

Keywords: receptive multilingualism, mediated receptive multilingualism, comprehension, Estonian, Russian, Ukrainian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Rethinking Receptive Multilingualism
  • 3.Experiment and participants
    • 3.1General context
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Testing material
    • 3.4Experimental procedure
  • 4.Results and analysis
    • 4.1Success rates across the groups
    • 4.2Factors facilitating understanding
      • 4.2.1Exposure to Russian
      • 4.2.2Exposure to various registers
      • 4.2.3M-Factor and metalinguistic awareness
      • 4.2.4Motivation and language attitudes
      • 4.2.5Learnability
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17079.ver
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