Livvinkarjalan ymmärtämisen strategioita
Strategies in Olonets Karelian text comprehension

Summary/Abstract: Research on receptive multilingualism has, in the context of several language families, shown that when a reader meets with a text written in a closely related language, comprehension starts with recognizing words that bear resemblance to his/her mother tongue. However, even cognate languages have developed differently and may have, for example, adopted loan words from different sources. Consequently, relying on similarities is not sufficient enough to understand the whole meaning of the text but other kind of inferencing is needed as well. In the present article, the authors examine the cognitive strategies employed by 60 Finnish-speaking students when translating an Olonets Karelian text into Finnish. Te article focuses on a specific sentence that is difficult to understand because of a few Russian loan words. Te students have translated the text into Finnish and described their translation process, thus offering a possibility to investigate the consciously used understanding strategies. Te analysis shows that the students have relayed on the similar vocabulary of Karelian and Finnish and on metalinguistic knowledge. Furthermore, they have taken the textual context as well as general knowledge into consideration. Different strategies seem to work in parallel and support each other. Te results are compared with earlier studies on mutual understanding of Finnish and Estonian. In addition, the practical applicability of the results is considered: would it be beneficial to teach understanding and inferencing strategies to the learners of a related language?

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