Does German Help Speakers of Dutch to Understand Written and Spoken Danish Words? The Role of Non-Native Language Knowledge in Decoding an Unknown but Related Language

Research has shown that speakers often transfer knowledge from their native language or another previously learnt language while acquiring a new language. A great amount of research has been done on language transfer in multilingual language acquisition (e.g. De Angelis and Dewaele 2011; Aronin and Hufeisen 2009; Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner 2001; Dewaele 2001; Grosjean 2001) and the advantages of knowing more languages for acquiring a new language (see, for example, Dewaele 2010; Dewaele 2007; Targonska 2004; Kemp 2001). In this chapter, we investigate whether non-native language knowledge also has a positive effect on receptive multilingualism, a way of communicating whereby people that speak different but related L1s communicate by each using their own L1 and trying to understand each other by focusing on the linguistic features their languages have in common instead of actively acquiring the other language.