Intercomprehension between two unrelated languages

Intercomprehension is a form of communication in which a person uses his or her linguistic knowledge to understand other (unknown) languages, which allows two people of different nations to communicate with each other, each using his or her native language. Earlier studies have shown that intercomprehension between related languages is possible. Once intercomprehension between related languages is studied, the step to intercomprehension between unrelated languages is not far off. The present case study focused on written text comprehension only, and investigated whether native speakers of Italian who had attended a course in intercomprehension between Romance languages were able to transfer their strategies to a reading comprehension test and translation of a newspaper article in an unfamiliar Germanic language (Dutch).