Do differences among first languages (LI) affect word recognition in reading a second language (L2)? Participants in this study had either Indonesian (an alphabetic language) or Chinese (a logographic language) as an L1 and were learning English (an alphabetic language) as an L2. Under the connectionist rubric, it was predicted that an alphabetic LI would facilitate word recognition in an alphabetic L2, especially if the LI and L2 have similar spelling patterns. Facilitation is relative to a logographic LI. The model also predicted a better recognition for high-frequency words in the L2 relative to low-frequency words. The results of a lexical decision task largely confirmed these hypotheses.Understanding the development of word recognition skills is of critical importance in second language (L2) reading research. Reading is a complex task, involving a number of subcomponent processes. In order to gain fluency, therefore, many subcomponent processing skills -those at lower levels in particular -must become automated. In addition, a majority of L2 readers must cope with the change from one orthographic system to another. Hence, we can expect that LI processing skills, however well developed, are not readily available during L2 processing without substantial adjustments among L2 learners from structurally different LI orthographic backgrounds. It is conceivable, then, that L2 word recognition is facilitated to the extent that the LI orthographic systems are typologically related to the L2 system.Currently, three types of orthographies are in use: Iogography, syllabary, and alphabet. In logography, one graphemic unit normally represents an entire word or morpheme. The representational unit in the other two systems, in contrast, is an intraword segment -a syllable in the syllabary and a phoneme in the alpha-

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Adult listeners are able to discriminate between and often identify spoken samples of languages that are unknown to them. Two studies were designed to explore which perceptual properties inherent within the phonological structure of languages are salient to foreign language listeners.In study one, fifteen subjects were asked to judge whether pairs of spoken foreign language sentences were selected from same or different languages and to explain how they had made the judgement. A multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) was conducted on the subject responses for the 'same language' condition. The resulting map revealed that responses could be characterized along two dimensions: phonologically based psychoacoustic properties and talker specific characteristics. The two dimensions define the distinctiveness of the languages and elicited different perceptual feature relationships in subjects.In study two, this perceptual feature relationship was tested using similarity judgements. Thirty subjects rated similarity on a sevenpoint scale for the same set of sentence pairs that had been judged in study one. MDS analysis revealed that the 'different language' condition yielded a map in which the language proximities closely approximated those which had been derived by focusing on phonological properties. This finding suggests that since analysis of both 'different language' and 'same language' sentence pairs produced similar maps, perceived language similarity among foreign languages depends upon the listeners' salient organizational categories inherent within the phonological structure of language and the talker specific characteristics of voice quality and speech rate.

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