Sound correspondences and cognate recognition in Slavic intercomprehension

The present research aims to evaluate to what extent cognate recognition in an in-tercomprehension context is affected by interlingual correspondences concerning a set of consonantal articulatory features, e.g. place of articulation (Vanhove & Berthele 2015; Gooskens & van Heuven 2019). The study simulates the decoding of written Slovak by L1 Polish readers with no knowledge of the target language. 77 L1 Polish participants were asked to translate a set of nonwords, described to them as existing Slovak words and presented in writing, first in isolation, then within a meaningful Slovak sentence, the presence of context having been shown to often play a decisive role in intercomprehension (Heinz 2009; Jágrová et al. 2021). The stimuli were created by manipulating a single articulatory parameter of the initial consonant of 24 Polish two- and three-syllable words. The parameters considered included voicing, palatalization, and place of articulation, further cate-gorised into more specific patterns (e.g. velar to labio-dental). Control predictors include overall frequency, phonological neighbourhood size and phonological neighbourhood frequency. The use of written stimuli to investigate the effect of phonological features is legitimated by evidence that in an intercomprehension setting, participants usually attempt to read target items using the orthography of their L1 (Möller & Zeevaert 2015). Moreover, phonological information has been shown to play an important role in the recognition of written words (Comesaña et al. 2016; Brysbaert 2022). A significant interaction was found between the presence of a meaningful context, on the one hand, and selected interlingual correspondences, on the other hand. More specifically, when the stimuli were presented in isolation, cognate recogni-tion was affected to a lesser extent by changes affecting palatalisation, and to a greater extent by a set of changes concerning place of articulation (e.g. velar to bi-labial) and secondarily voicing. Shorter words proved harder to recognise, too. The presentation discusses the implications of the results for the problem of cog-nate recognition in intercomprehension, along with some methodological details that are deemed to play a major role in this research area, such as the impact of context and the criteria for the evaluation of participants’ responses.