Il ruolo della trasparenza lessicale nella comprensione orale: analisi di un corpus di dati sull’ascolto dello spagnolo e il portoghese.

This study presents an analysis regarding oral comprehension between closely related languages. The main purpose of the work is to describe some implications about the lexical transparency in listening audio recordings in Spanish and Portuguese by Italian speakers with no competence in both languages. The first part of the paper shows the theoretical assumptions of the research related to listening, defined as a complex process conditioned both by input and listener’s features. The study focuses in particular on the lexical transparency, which is one of the factors that most affect the listening comprehension process. Based on these premises, in the second part of the study, it will be presented the analysis of some data obtained during an experiment at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre. The work focuses on an analysis of the listening comprehension of texts in Spanish and Portuguese by Italian speakers with no declared competence in these languages. In order to analyse the process of understanding, it was adopted an indirect analysis protocol that uses an elicitation technique analogous to Think Aloud Protocol, in which participants are asked to translate and write into Italian adding metalinguistic comments where they consider it necessary. The data is then analysed comparing the texts produced by the informants and the transcription of the original texts. The results of this comparison are presented and discussed.