Rezeptive Mehrsprachigkeit und Sprachdistanz deutsch-niederländisch

Wenzel Veronika

Abstract

Aus der Verlagsmeldung: Language distance has always been regarded a crucial aspect of understanding a foreign language. Language distance is measurable by Levenshtein algorithm. Research on bilingualism has focused on (visual) word recognition of homographs, homophones and cognates and supports an overlapping bilingual memory model. This overlap must be expected in multilinguals as well and must lead to a rather complex model. This article discusses the concepts of language distance (measurement) and mental lexicon (models) from the perspective of the intercomprehensional skills of 'real' subjects reading a text in an unknown language Dutch with little - though quite regular - distance to their L1 (German) and L2 (English). The author points at some effects that text construction, dominant language networks and phonetic reading ability may have on cognate recognition.