The transfer effect of first language metalinguistic skills on second language learning of Chinese and Spanish

Metalinguistic skills, such as phonological awareness and rapid naming, have been found to facilitate first language learning in languages with a transparent orthography such as Spanish. On the other hand, metalinguistic skills such as visual-spatial memory have been correlated with first language learning of non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. However, there are no studies that have correlated these metalinguistic skills of first language to learning outcomes of both alphabetic and non-alphabetic second languages. The current study investigated how different metalinguistic skills in English speakers will facilitate the acquisition of a different second language (i.e. Spanish and Chinese). Our study revealed a significant language effect in both meaning learning and pronunciation learning with Spanish reaching a higher accuracy level than Chinese. We found a significant learning effect for meaning from day 1 to day 5 in both languages. Our results also demonstrated a significant learning effect for Chinese pronunciation from day 1 to day 5. However, because Spanish learning reached a ceiling after a short time of training, no significant learning was found with the Spanish pronunciation. Several metalinguistic skills in first language were found to predict Spanish pronunciation learning, but not Chinese learning, including phonological awareness, rapid naming, visual spatial skills, and verbal working memory. Direct comparison showed that rapid naming was significantly more correlated with Spanish pronunciation learning than Chinese pronunciation learning. This may be due to greater similarity between L1, English, and L2, Spanish, than that between English and Chinese. These findings suggest a faster learning rate and a greater predictive relationship between L1 metalinguistic skills and L2 learning outcome when L1 and L2 are similar.