The impact of interlingual correspondences on cognate recognition in Slavic intercomprehension

The present paper is devoted to the problem of cognate recognition in an intercomprehension setting, in which the target language is not directly known to the readers, but is closely related to their native language. Previous research has shown that once context is accounted for, intelligibility is partially predicted by measures of interlingual proximity such as Levenshtein distance. Taken alone, however, such measures are insufficient to fully explain empirical data. It has thus been suggested that specific interlingual correspondences may have a more conspicuous impact than others. To verify this hypothesis, 163 East Slavic-speaking learners of L2 Polish were asked to translate a set of non-words, obtained by manipulating a set of Russian words with respect to a single segment (e.g. initial consonant). All non-words were consistent with Polish phonotactics; however, some modifications matched existing phonological correspondences between Polish and Russian, while others did not. Target items were presented in writing through an online survey, initially in isolation, subsequently within a meaningful sentence. The results show that the presence of a meaningful context significantly improves the chances of cognate recognition. Further, non-words containing systematic sound correspondences resulted in a higher recognition rate than non-words comprising arbitrary modifications. Within the latter group, finally, modifications to consonants in word-initial and word-medial position as well as diverging positions of the stress resulted in significantly lower recognition scores.