Semantische Disambiguierung von false friends in slavischen L3: die Rolle des Kontexts

Abstract

The paper investigates the influence of previously acquired Slavic languages on the perception of speech in further Slavic languages. It focusses on the phenomenon of ambiguous words across languages, i.e. words that carry different meanings in spite of their phonetic similarity (a phenomenon known as false friends or deceptive cognates). It studies the chances of dissimilating seemingly identical meanings on the basis of context, and approaches the question which other features (such as individual proficiency, typological distance between the languages in question, and perception channel: written vs. spoken texts) enhance or impair disambiguation. The data collected in a cross-slavic comprehension test shows, that one decisive factor for detecting differences in meaning lies in the amount of perceived context that enables the listener to construct a semantically coherent utterance. On the other hand, context influence can also have negative consequences: if the context is not sufficient, the attempt to build up a senseful utterance can make listeners revise not only the results of their lexical decision, but even that of phonologic interpretation. The examples mentioned in the paper show the depth of context influence as well as the differences between phonological and lexical processing in L1 at the one hand, and L2 or L3 on the other. Thus, the investigation of L2-Transfer in spoken language perception may lead to results differing from those in L1 perception.