Orthographic input and phonological representations in learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language

This paper provides evidence that the second language orthographic input affects the mental representations of L2 phonology in instructed beginner L2 learners. Previous research has shown that orthographic representations affect monolinguals’ performance in phonological awareness tasks; in instructed L2 learners such representations could also affect pronunciation. This study looked at the phonological representations of Chinese rimes in beginner learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language, using a phoneme counting task and a phoneme segmentation task. Results show that learners do not count or segment the main vowel in those syllables where it is not represented in the pinyin (romanisation) orthographic representations. It appears that the pinyin orthographic input is reinterpreted according to L1 phonology-orthography correspondences, and interacts with the phonological input in shaping the phonological representations of Chinese syllables in beginner learners. This explains previous findings that learners of Chinese do not pronounce the main vowel in these syllables. INTRODUCTION The role of the orthographic input in the acquisition of second language phonology has been hitherto almost completely neglected. On the one hand, research on monolingual speakers shows that their performance in phonological awareness tasks is affected by orthographic representations. On the other hand, research on second language (L2) learners shows that their L2 pronunciation is affected by L2 orthographic representations. Do L2 orthographic representations affect the mental representations of L2 phonology in L2 learners, such leading to non-target-like pronunciations? This paper looks at the effects of some orthographic conventions of the pinyin romanization system on the phonological representations of Chinese syllables in instructed beginner learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). It is proposed that the non-target-like pronunciation of some syllables by CFL learners can be attributed to the effects of the pinyin orthographic representations on learners’ L2 phonological representations. Effects of orthography on L1 phonological representations Much research shows that the phonological awareness of literate speakers, as reflected in phonological awareness tasks, is affected by the orthographic representation of the spoken language at both a global and local level. At a global level, writing systems largely determine which language units literate speakers are aware of, i.e. which language units they can identify (as reflected in counting, segmenting or matching tasks) and manipulate (as reflected in moving, deleting, adding, reversing or blending tasks). At a local level, the specific orthographic form of a language unit (e.g., a word or a syllable) can affect how literate speakers represent its phonology. At the global level, readers of alphabetic writing systems are aware of phonemes, literate Japanese speakers are aware of morae, literate Arabic speakers are aware of CV units, and so on (Cook and Bassetti 2005). Speakers are generally not aware of language units not represented in their writing system: illiterates mostly cannot perform tasks requiring awareness of phonemes (Bertelson et al. 1989; Morais et al. 1979); literate English speakers cannot consistently identify syllable boundaries (Miller et al. in preparation). Native speakers of a same language can or cannot identify and manipulate language units depending on which writing system they know (Padakannaya 2000; Read et al. 1987), and even minimal exposure to a writing system can improve performance on tasks requiring awareness of the language units it represents (Huang & Hanley 1997; Ko & Lee 1997). When requested to manipulate language units not represented in