Intercomprehension and plurilingualism: a comparison between university students of languages and students of non-linguistic disciplines

The present study compares competence in the intercomprehension of Spanish by two groups of Italian native speakers: students of foreign languages and students of non-linguistic disciplines, mainly engineering, at university level. The aim is to verify whether the plurilingual competence and the more developed metalinguistic competence of students of languages facilitate the understanding of a text written in an unknown cognate language. The analyses show similarities more than differences between the two groups in the comprehension of content, which is assessed in terms of global, analytic and inferential comprehension, as well as in comprehension strategies. The advantage of students of languages emerges only in the amount of time they needed for translating the text from Spanish into Italian. The findings confirm that intercomprehension among cognate languages is a highly spontaneous phenomenon and boost the usage of intercomprehension as an effective resource to increase motivation in language learning and to promote plurilingualism.