The relevance of the semantic context in inter-understanding: an example based on the interpretation of Italian from Spanish

Abstract

This paper reports a study model for further research carried out with four participants in order to show that the general theses held in works such as, for example, the one of López-Astorga in 2017 about linguistic inter-understanding deserve to be considered. The goal is to support the idea that such theses are clearly useful to describe the mental processes that actually happen when individuals speaking a particular language try to interpret another language that, while it is different from theirs, it is also very similar or close to it. The theses basically claim that those mental processes have to be akin to inductions such as described by the mental models theory. So, this last approach is assumed here as well. In this way, the main conclusion of the study, whose participants were Spanish-speaking students that had to interpret firstly an Italian word and then a complete sentence with that very word in that same language, and who did not know Italian, is that, in accordance with the aforementioned theses, the semantic context in which a word is can be essential in the linguistic processes of inter-understanding.