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Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale | Vol. 50 | September 2016

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Research Article

Oral Inter-Understanding of Words in a Phrasal Context

Lexical Transparency in the Language Couple Italian-French

Denis Passalent    Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia    

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abstract

This article examines the role of oral lexical transparency of some words in the field of romance languages’ inter-comprehension. An initial list of 200 Italian words was presented orally without context to a group of French people who had no knowledge of the Italian language. Eleven of these words had then been submitted in different sentences with a different level and nature of transparency to another group made up of a variety of French adolescents and adults. They had to concentrate on every useful linguistic element – phonological similarities or contextual clues – present in the phrasal context and then recognize the meaning of the Italian words. After presenting the methodology of the research, the essay goes on to analyse the data collected and to give some conclusions. Overall, words are better understood in the presence of a context and adults seem to have more strategies to adopt in order to grasp the meaning of the given words.

Published
Sept. 30, 2016
Accepted
July 16, 2016
Submitted
April 12, 2016
Language
IT

Keywords: French • Italian • Phrasal context • Transparency • Lexicon

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-1562/AnnOc-50-16-8

Copyright: © 2016 Denis Passalent. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.