Are you reading what I am reading? The impact of contrasting alphabetic scripts on reading English

This study examines the impact of the crosslinguistic similarity of translation equivalents on word recognition by Russian-English bilinguals, who are fluent in languages with two different but partially overlapping writing systems. Current models for bilingual word recognition, like BIA+, hold that all words that are similar to the input letter string are activated and considered for selection, irrespective of the language to which they belong (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002). These activation models are consistent with empirical data for bilinguals with totally different scripts, like Japanese and English (Miwa et al., 2014). Little is known about the bilingual processing of Russian and English, but studies indicate that the partially distinct character of the Russian and English scripts does not prevent co-activation (Jouravlev and Jared, 2014; Marian and Spivey, 2003; Kaushanskaya and Marian, 2007). Many Russian-English translation equivalents are in part composed of shared letters that can potentially activate both Russian and English word candidates. Often, these letters have ambiguous phonemic mappings across the two languages. The degree of ambiguity is high especially when shapes of block-letters and letters in italics overlap across languages. For instance, a printed Russian letter ‘и’ does not look like any letter of the English alphabet, but the shape of its handwritten equivalent ‘u’ perfectly coincides with the English hand-written grapheme. We identified 5 overlapping pairs of printed English block-letters and Russian letters in italics (g, r, m, n, u). Our study started from the assumption that even when a bilingual reads English words in printed font, letter shapes also activate handwritten Russian letters with similar shapes in a bottom-up way. We focused on the impact of convergence and divergence in Russian and English script coding for cognates and non-cognates. Cognates are translation equivalents with significant cross-linguistic form overlap in phonology and/or orthography (e.g., ‘marriage’ in English, ‘mariage’ in French). Cognates are generally processed more quickly by bilinguals than matched control words (for an overview of studies, see Dijkstra, Miwa et al., 2010). However, as far as we know, cognate processing for the Russian-English language pair has not been examined before.