Intercultural Communicative Competence in Lingua Franca, Multilingualism and Plurilingualism

Intercultural Communicative Competence in Lingua Franca, Multilingualism and Plurilingualism

Drobot, Irina-Ana

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from a psycholinguistics approach, how a foreign language may be understood at least partly on the basis of knowledge of one’s native language and perhaps on other languages one has previously learnt. An example of such a situation would be a Romanian native speaker who knows French as a foreign language and English and tries to understand Spanish. The respective speaker would try to make various connections between similar words in Romanian and French mostly as these are languages from the same family as Spanish when trying to infer the meaning of various words. Theories of language comprehension may help in the understanding of the process. A modular view and an interactive view of sentence processing will both be taken into account. “A modular view of sentence processing assumes that the stages involved in reading a sentence function independently in separate modules” while “an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint-based lexical approach assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time.” (Wikipedia). Theories of language acquisition may also help in explaining this situation, as trying to understand a language one doesn’t know is a first step in beginning to learn the respective language. What is more, this situation helps support the theory of the universal grammar, which states that everybody has an innate language faculty. The abstract system of the Spanish language in our case doesn’t have to be learned, it is already there. Of course, learning is necessary in order to completely master the language, yet there are some intuitive means of understanding it at least partly, based on analogies with other languages.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05-04

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