Les bénéfices de la proximité. La compréhension orale spontanée du français, langue proche inconnue, par des italophones. Etude de cas.

The issue of this article is about contacts between romance languages in the context of research on Intercomprehension between related languages. It presents two case studies on the comprehension of a complex oral discourse in French by two Italian native speakers. It shows that without any or little knowledge of French, native speakers of Italian are able to understand spontaneously a significant amount of words - basically cognates - and the global meaning of an oral text, in a way similar, though less evident, to what had been shown before for written texts. The experiment was developed through a think aloud protocol, whereby, not only the linguistic restitution of the meaning in L1 but also some of the comprehension strategies that are used can be captured. This experiment, which is part of a larger one with several other documents, is treated here in order to accurately analyze the mechanism of positive or negative transfers (or lack of transfers) through a spontaneous comparative process. Such an experiment demonstrates that the bases for implementing oral intercomprehensive didactic methodology exists.