Competenza metalinguistica e apprendimento lessicale nella didattica basata sull'intercomprensione: un esperimento sulle lingue slave

This work considers the role of metalinguistic knowledge in intercomprehension-based lexical acquisition (IC). IC here designates the partial accessibility of a novel L3 (Polish) based on its similarity to a known “bridge language” (L2 Russian). 13 L1 Italian students of L2 Russian took part in a Slavic linguistics course devoted to a contrastive description of Russian and Polish, with particular regard to the phonological correspondences between the two languages. At the end of the course, the students took part in an experiment in which they were first asked to briefly study 15 Polish target words, then to reproduce them based on their Italian translation. The latter task was repeated one week later. The results do not reveal any statistically significant trends regarding the accessibility of systematic phonological correspondences. The discussion presents some considerations in this respect, focussing on the role of metalinguistic competence in the context of intercomprehension.