Impact of Cyrillic on Native English Speakers’ Phono-lexical Acquisition of Russian

Abstract

We investigated the influence of grapheme familiarity and native language grapheme-phoneme correspondences during second language lexical learning. Native English speakers learned Russian-like words via auditory presentations containing only familiar first language phones, pictured meanings, and exposure to either Cyrillic orthographic forms (Orthography condition) or the sequence <XXX> (No Orthography condition). Orthography participants saw three types of written forms: familiar-congruent (e.g., <KOM>-[kom]), familiar-incongruent (e.g., <PAT>-[rɑt]), and unfamiliar (e.g., <ФИЛ>-[fil]). At test, participants determined whether pictures and words matched according to what they saw during word learning. All participants performed near ceiling in all stimulus conditions, except for Orthography participants on words containing incongruent grapheme-phoneme correspondences. These results suggest that first language grapheme-phoneme correspondences can cause interference during second language phono-lexical acquisition. In addition, these results suggest that orthographic input effects are robust enough to interfere even when the input does not contain novel phones.

Second language learning of phonological alternations with and without orthographic input: Evidence from the acquisition of a German-like voicing alternation

“…By contrast, other researchers have reported no beneficial effect of exposure to orthographic input on the acquisition of a novel phonological contrast (Durham, Hayes-Harb, Barrios, & Showalter, 2016;Hayes-Harb & Hacking, 2015;Pytlyk, 2011;Showalter & Hayes-Harb, 2015;Simon, Chambless, & Kickhöfel Alves, 2010) or have demonstrated that orthographic input may interfere with the acquisition of target-like L2 phonological representations, particularly when the written input provides learners with "misleading" information about the phonological forms of new words. Interference effects have been reported when L2 orthographic conventions differ from those of the native language (L1; Bassetti, 2006), when grapheme-phoneme correspondences (i.e., the mapping[s] between grapheme and phoneme) are different in the L1 and L2 (Hayes-Harb & Cheng, 2016;Hayes-Harb et al, 2010;Showalter, 2018), or when the L1 and L2 differ in whether or not familiar graphemes signal a contrast (Escudero et al, 2014). Other factors, including the degree of perceptual difficulty posed by the contrast (Escudero, 2015) and the transparency of the L2 writing system (Mok, Lee, Li, & Xu, 2018), have also been found to modulate written input effects.…”

Russian Phono-Lexical Acquisition and Orthographic Input

“…It is expected that learners, at some stage, map Russian graphemes and phonemes in a targetlike manner, but whether this is true has not been empirically found. Finally, Showalter (2018), Comer and Murphy-Lee (2004), and Bown et al (2007) present evidence that Russian GPCs are difficult for naïve and beginner learners. It is expected that learners with more Russian experience will be less affected by “misleading” OI.…”

“…Showalter (2018) investigated the effects of grapheme familiarity and congruence on native English speakers’ ability to make inferences about the phonological forms of L2 pseudo-Russian words. During a word-learning phase, participants heard auditory forms of words, saw pictured meanings, and either saw a meaningless sequence of letters (i.e., <XXX>) or saw Cyrillic forms.…”

“…A change from Showalter (2018) is the inclusion of Russian language learners. Because Orthography and No Orthography condition naïve learners’ performances differed, and interference effects were quite robust, it is of interest to determine when these effects are “overcome” during L2 Russian acquisition.…”

Written training tasks are better than oral training tasks at improving L2 learners’ speech production

“…Orthography has been widely shown to influence L2 perception and/or word form learning. Orthography can have a facilitating (e.g., Showalter & Hayes-Harb, 2013), mixed (e.g., Detey & Nespoulous, 2008;Escudero, 2015), negative (e.g., Bassetti, 2017;Hayes-Harb, Brown, & Smith, 2018;Mathieu, 2016;Showalter, 2018) or null (Simon, Chambless, & Kickhöfel Alves, 2010) effect.…”