Intelligibility of Slavic Languages for Russian Native Speakers

Here we study the intelligibility of Slavic languages to native speakers of Russian. We conducted cloze test experiments over pieces of written text in Russian translated into eight Slavic languages: Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Slovene, and Bulgarian. The task was to restore omitted words in a Russian text using a parallel text in a Slavic language. Our first hypothesis was that a parallel text in an unknown related language increases the correctness of answers, and the increase correlates with the intelligibility of the parallel text language, which was confirmed by the obtained results. Another hypothesis was that the intelligibility of a text in a related language depends not only on the percentage of cognates or non-cognates, but also of cognate synonyms and false friends. Here the connection was not as straightforward, the issue requires further research. Results also showed that pieces of text differ noticeably in intelligibility (both when filling gaps in it without any help or with clues from an unknown related language) which means that we are dealing with the intelligibility of a text rather than of a language.