The English native speaker facing Romance Languages through Intercomprehension

Abstract

Studies carried out by the EuroCom group have shown that English, due to its mixed nature between the Germanic and Romance families, can be the basis for transfer for understanding Romance texts through intercomprehension. After presenting the theoretical bases from which this study took inspiration, a case study will be presented. The present case study investigated the sources of transfer that two English native speakers with a B2/C1 level in Italian, without having any instruction in IC, used in order to understand some scientific texts in Spanish, French and Portuguese. Due to the high percentage of words with a Latin cognate that are also commonly used in scientific language in English, we will be able to observe that the main source for transfer will be English itself, despite the high proficiency in Italian of the two research subjects. In addition the study presents some reflections upon the case study results comparing the roles played by English and Italian with regard to spontaneous IC.