La reconnaissance de mots isolés à l’oral: expérience en miroir entre français et italien

This article will present the results of two related experiments, whose aim is to evaluate the degree of spontaneous listening Intercomprehension (IC) between French and Italian, as far as lexis is concerned, and to see if the success and the difficulties encountered are symmetrical or not, depending on the language, whether French or Italian. First of all, a group of Italian people, who have never studied French, was invited to listen to a set of French words and asked to associate them spontaneously to the corresponding Italian words. At a later stage, the same words in Italian were presented to a group of French people, who did not know Italian, and who, in contrast, were asked to associate a French word to each Italian word heard. The results of this observation were interpreted in the light of the models of listening comprehension, thus showing that an area of substantial transparency effectively exists in two similar percentages, although these are slightly lower for francophones. Moreover, evidence shows that in both cases adults are better at ease in performing this task than teenagers. However, transparency is not always symmetrical if according to the direction of the pairings, and a maximum gap between transparency and opacity from one language to the other occurs in some words.