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Interlingual text comprehension: Linguistic and extralinguistic determinants

  • Renée van Bezooijen
  • , Charlotte Gooskens

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    The three West-Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are so closely related that they can be expected to be mutually intelligible to a large extent. In the present investigation, we established the intelligibility of written Afrikaans and Frisian by Dutch-speaking subjects. It appeared that it is easier for speakers of Dutch to understand Afrikaans than Frisian. In order to explain the results, attitudes as well as linguistic distances were assessed. There was no evidence of a relationship between attitude and intelligibility. Three linguistic distances did show a relationship with reading comprehension, namely the number of non-cognates, the transparency of the lexical relatedness of cognates, and the Levenshtein distance, which calculates the similarity between the written forms of words.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationReceptive Multilingualism: Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts
    EditorsJan D ten Thije, Ludger Zeevaert
    Place of PublicationAmsterdam, Netherlands
    PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
    Pages249-264
    Edition1
    ISBN (Print)9789027292476, 9789027219268
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2007

    Publication series

    NameHamburg Studies on Multilingualism
    PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
    Number6
    ISSN (Electronic)1571-4934

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