The role of language exposure in mediated receptive multilingualism
The role of language exposure in mediated receptive multilingualism

Summary/Abstract: In this study, we investigate the role of exposure to L2 Russian on comprehension of L3 Ukrainian by speakers of L1 Estonian, using the mediating knowledge of L2 Russian. The experiment involved 30 participants and the following materials: a questionnaire, C-test in Russian, word recognition and text comprehension tasks in Ukrainian. We demonstrate that in mediated receptive multilingualism medium to high levels of L2 exposure boost L3 comprehension regardless of measured L2 proficiency. However, exposure enhanced comprehension only on the word level and not on the text level, highlighting the importance of examining comprehension in a differentiated manner. The same restriction holds for targeted L2–L3 instructions, which were administered as a shortcut to increasing metalinguistic awareness between Russian and Ukrainian: these instructions improved L3 word level but not text level comprehension. Since in the absence of explicit instruction the role of exposure was more pronounced, we argue that exposure and instructions interact depending on the particular configurations of available resources, as language users attempt to understand another language. We conclude that exposure to medium language is a crucial factor that might significantly boost comprehension in the target language through increased metalinguistic awareness, either more directly or by creating opportunities for incidental learning.

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