Alphabetic and nonalphabetic L1 effects in English word identification: a comparison of Korean and Chinese English L2 learners

Abstract

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with a nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. IntroductionDifferent writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping (DeFrancis, 1989;Perfetti, 1999). An alphabetic system selects phonemes, a syllabary system selects syllables, and a logographic system, traditionally considered, selects morphemes or words to represent spoken language. The effect of these systemic differences on the cognitive processes of reading has been the focus of research that focuses on the contrast between Chinese and English (Perfetti, Liu, & Tan, 2002). Chinese, usually considered a logographic writing system, maps a printed character to a corresponding monosyllabic morpheme. Because this mapping reflects a unit of pronunciation (the syllable) as well as a unit of meaning (the morpheme), Chinese can be characterized as a morpho-syllabic writing system (DeFrancis, 1989;Mattingly, 1992;Perfetti & Zhang, 1995). However, its contrast with an alphabetic system remains sharp. The Chinese writing system does not possess the segmental structure that is basic to alphabetic writing systems. The principle of phonological assembly that, in alphabetic systems, allows larger (syllable and word) units to be assembled from letter-phoneme mappings, e.g. /k/-/ae/-/t/ is assembled to make /kaet/, cannot apply in Chinese reading.An additional interesting difference between Chinese and most alphabetic s...

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