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Most researchers agree on the idea that multilinguals have specific advantages over monolinguals in learning more languages and, more generally, develop specific competencies for expanding and managing their multilingual repertoire. Of particular interest, most notably in the context of the European strive for the upward revaluation of smaller, less used languages, is the development of receptive competences in several genetically closely related languages (cf. e.g. the EuroCom-projects). This contribution presents empirical evidence that, on the one hand, seems to support the claim that multilinguals are more efficient in developing receptive competences in new, previously unlearnt languages. The article focuses on the question how multilinguals use their languages in order to guess the meaning of cognates in unlearnt but genealogically close languages. A series of studies is discussed whose aim is to tap into this process of interlingual inferencing. Different measures for phonological and graphematic distances across languages are established and correlated with the rates of successful cognate recognition in the search for a threshold of string similarity beyond which recognition becomes unlikely. The role of different types of the participants’ multilingual repertoires is assessed, and other factors influencing good performance in cognate recognition are identified. The process of interlingual inferencing is discussed as a form of abductive reasoning, and quantitative and qualitative data are analyzed to support the idea that this type of abduction is an essential driving force in receptive multilingualism and language comprehension in general. 192 Raphael Berthele 1. Inferencing and abductive reasoning in language learning and use There is converging evidence for the claim that biand multilinguals have, at least in some respects, advantages over monolinguals in learning additional languages (Cenoz 2003: 82, Cummins 2000: 35).The explanations offered for these advantages in third language acquisition (TLA) refer to advantages in cognitive development or to enhanced language awareness (Jessner 1999), sometimes also termed the “M-factor” (Herdina and Jessner 2002: 131). Learning and using two languages is hypothesized to lead to enhancements in particular cognitive skills and/or language awareness, which in turn leads to measurable advantages – at least regarding general efficiency – in TLA (cf. also de Angelis 2007, Le Pichon Vorstman et al. 2009). The empirical studies presented in this chapter focus on a narrowly defined aspect of linguistic competence, the recognition of cognates in closely related but unknown languages. More concretely, this research attempts to tap into a cognitive mechanism which is likely to contribute to the advantages in TLA within genealogically related languages observed by scholarly research in the past. The goal of the deliberately reductionist approach discussed below is to shed new light on a pivotal resource in multiple language learning: interlingual correspondences. The research questions that will be addressed in this chapter are the following: 1) Are there multilingual profiles (regarding the languages in the individual multilingual repertoire) that favour the rapid recognition of familiar words in unknown target languages? 2) Are there other characteristics of the participants that influence the quality of the interlingual recognition process? 3) Which linguistic properties of target items (words) allow for spontaneous interlingual recognition, and which limit the spontaneous inferability of items? These three questions will be addressed using data elicitation methods described in Section 2. Section 1 provides a brief overview of the context of this research and the most relevant literature, and Section 3 offers some concluding remarks. The main point of this chapter is theoretical. It will be argued that one of the key inferencing procedures that underlie the linguistic tasks in the scope of our studies is of the abductive type. The particular nature of abduction, then, can be used as an explanation as to why bi-/multilinguals do better at the particular tasks we used and, as a consequence of this first conclusion, why many bi/multilinguals might be better at language learning in general. On abduction in receptive multilingualism. Evidence from cognate guessing tasks 193 1.1. M-Factor; bi-/plurilingual competence A focus on cross-linguistic similarities is becoming increasingly important as a means of promoting the usage value of less commonly used languages (LOTE, languages other than English) in light of an over-emphasis on teaching English. As one of many examples, the EuroCom framework (Hufeisen and Marx 2007, McCann et al. 2003) aims at the rapid development of comprehension skills in reading and listening in one family of languages at a time (Romance or Germanic). Picking up on an idea already present in Lado’s (1957) contrastive analysis hypothesis, these frameworks pursue a double focus: on the one hand, the potential of interlingually transparent words and structures is documented, on the other, particular features that are unique for the particular language are listed and presented. Although the general idea of this enterprise seems very promising, one of its main weaknesses is its orientation towards a detailed, lengthy, list-based presentation of interlingual correspondences that draws on the philological tradition. The usability of these lists remains at best unclear. As an example, sound correspondences across Germanic languages are presented in EuroComGerm (Hufeisen and Marx 2007) on no fewer than 44 pages. Given the density of these contents, and despite the fact that the authors have made great efforts to reduce the philological complexity, it seems that there should be better, more frugal ways of preparing multilinguals for the task of reading in an unknown but genealogically familiar language. 1.2. Inferencing, transfer and hypothesis testing According to Carton (1971), one of the fundamental principles in language learning is the ability to draw inferences. Studer (2008) deems inferencing a central process in almost any receptive activity of language users. Inferences can be drawn based on co-textual or contextual information, based on knowledge of the target language, of languages in general or based on knowledge that links different languages in the multilingual system together. It is these latter inferences, the interlingual ones, which are at the very core of this chapter. Furthermore, such interlingual inferences are closely related to central questions on the potential (but also the danger) of language transfer, as discussed e.g. in Odlin (1989). For the remainder of this contribution, we consider interlingual inferencing as a mechanism that operates on potential transfer bases, i.e. on acquired and learnt items and structures in any language pertaining to the multilingual repertoire. Based on inferentially emerging interlingual identification, multilinguals can be said to transfer items and structures from one language into another. Both inferencing and transfer therefore participate in 194 Raphael Berthele the process of the dynamic construction of interlanguages in the form of often short-lived, spontaneous, hypothetical grammars, a process that is considered central to most modern theories of second/foreign language acquisition (see e.g. Gass and Selinker 1994: 6–7) as well as in multilingual language didactics (see e.g. Meissner 2001). However, the exact nature of these inferencing processes often remains surprisingly unclear. Most often, particularly in so called ‘constructivist’ teaching approaches, the emphasis lies on discovery, on ‘inductive’ procedures. These procedures are argued to be more efficient and more cognitively adequate for language learning than the traditional deductive or ‘instructivist’ methods (cf. Wolff 1994). In this regard, however, authors tend to forget that there is a third type of inferencing, namely abduction. Abduction was introduced into semiotic theory by Peirce (1931) who was interested in the “mental operation of guessing” and viewed abduction as a process of “forming an explanatory hypothesis” (CP 5.171). In the view of Eco (1984), abduction is the daring attempt to speculate about potential rules that might explain the meaning of a signifier (42). Figure 1. Three types of inferencing according to Eco (1984: 42). Bold lines refer to given knowledge, dotted lines refer to inferenced knowledge. Let us consider a token from the data collected in the studies discussed below and how it relates to the three types. One of the tasks involved the spontaneous guessing of the meaning of cognate verbs in Danish, a language none of the informants has learnt. As an example (1), the participants had to infer the meaning of the item blive, an item that was presented either aurally or in its written form (but not both). (1a) Aural-oral variant: [bli:ve] – What does this Danish verb mean? Participant: From French plier [plie:] or from English believe, [pli5] Interviewer: What’s that in English? On abduction in receptive multilingualism. Evidence from cognate guessing tasks 195 Participant: ’believe’, but this doesn’t fit in Interviewer: Why? [. . . ] (1b) Written task: What does the Danish verb  mean? bleiben; in Spanish v and b are often pronounced the same, [. . . ] thus „BLIBE“ → German bleiben (,to stay‘) Both examples are actual responses drawn from the study that will be described in more detail below. Example 1b is a vivid example of interlingual abduction: The participant is confronted with a stimulus, she has a gut feeling that it could be related to the German bleiben, and she looks for potential phonological ‘rules’ that might support and even explain this spontaneous analysis, using her knowledge of Spanish grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Based on Eco’s schematic representation of induction, deduction and