The influence of native language phonology on auditory and visual word recognition in Russian–English bilinguals

Abstract

Visual and auditory recognition of English monosyllabic words was examined in 21 native Russian bilinguals and 12 monolingual speakers of American English. Stimuli comprised 40 CVC minimal pairs distinguishable by four vowel contrasts. Experiment 1 tested visual word recognition following a semantic categorization task. Sixty of the tested words were previously shown in the categorization task, and 60 were new words, 40 of which represented minimal pair alternatives to previously shown words. In experiment 2 participants listened to all words from each minimal pair spoken by one male and one female speaker, and selected one word from each pair. No significant differences were found in the number of errors made by the bilingual and monolingual participants during visual word recognition. In auditory word recognition, bilingual listeners made significantly more errors on the two vowel contrasts that cannot be differentiated based on their native phonological categories. Auditory errors on these categories strongly and significantly correlated with participant’s age of arrival to the U.S.A. These results demonstrate the influence of native language phonology on auditory, but not visual word recognition by Russian–English bilinguals.