Understanding Across Languages Intercomprehension, Attitudes and Metacognitive Awareness among Plurilingual Speakers

This thesis investigates intercomprehension as a plurilingual competence that may support everyday communication in multilingual European contexts beyond formal educational settings. Situated within current debates on plurilingualism, English as a lingua franca and European language policy, the study frames intercomprehension as a communicative model in which speakers rely on their own language while understanding that of their interlocutors, thereby mobilising their existing linguistic repertoires and partial competences. The present study intends to examine attitudes towards intercomprehension and their possible relationship with mutual understanding, communicative asymmetries, and a sense of belonging to a multilingual European citizenship. The research adopts an exploratory mixed-methods design, structured as a convergent parallel study in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected in overlapping time windows and subsequently related through triangulation. The quantitative component consists of an anonymous online questionnaire administered via Google Forms, which collected 59 valid responses from participants residing in Italy and other European and non-European countries. The qualitative component comprises 8 semi-structured interviews accompanied by a Think Aloud protocol. Closed-ended questionnaire items were processed in Microsoft Excel, whereas open-ended questionnaire items and the interview/Think Aloud data were analysed through manual inductive thematic coding. Questionnaire, interview and Think Aloud results were then integrated at the level of individual participants to identify convergences and divergences between self-reported tendencies and observed comprehension strategies. The main findings show that most participants reported recognising comprehensible words or expressions in related languages, formulating hypotheses based on similarities with known languages, and relying on contextual clues. The Think Aloud tasks corroborated these self-reports by revealing genuine bottom-up and top-down transfer strategies and recognition of international vocabulary. Overall, the findings suggest that, within the contexts represented by this sample, intercomprehension may function as a spontaneously practised communicative resource that coexists with the instrumental use of English rather than replacing it.