L1 orthography: The effects on L2 word recognition of Thai and Chinese ESL learners

This study investigated the effects of L1 (first language) orthography on L2 (second language) word recognition. The issue investigated was whether word recognition mechanism developed and used in reading in one orthography is transferred to reading in another orthography, regardless of the degree of similarity in the structural and representational properties of the two orthographies. Previous cross-linguistics research has suggested that readers with different L1 orthographies develop different L1 mechanisms, which differentially affect their L2 word recognition mechanisms. This study tested this issue.;Two experimental tasks---naming and homophone judgment---were conducted with 70 adult L2 learners of English with contrasting L1 orthographic backgrounds (Thai and Chinese) and 20 native speakers of English (for a native baseline). The lexicality in stimuli in the naming task and the relationships between the cohort and core words in the homophone judgment task were controlled to explore the participants' dependence on phonological information in word recognition. The performances of the two ESL groups were compared on the basis of reaction time and accuracy.;The results for the naming task indicate (a) faster and more accurate recognition via the phonological mechanism used by the Thai group relative to the orthographic mechanism used by the Chinese group; (b) the influence of the frequency effect on the performances of the two groups; and (c) the influence of the expected regularity effects on the performance of the Thai group and of the unexpected regularity effects on the performance of the Chinese group.;The results for the homophone judgment task reveal (a) faster recognition of the Thai group compared with the Chinese group, indicating more facilitation imposed by the mechanism used by the Thai group than by the mechanism used by the Chinese group; and (b) stronger effects of the inconsistency between spelling and sound on the Chinese than on the Thai groups. These findings show that Thai readers rely more on phonological information, while the Chinese readers depend more on visual information. Findings indicate that the native Thai and Chinese readers utilize different word recognition mechanisms developed as a consequence of the characteristics of their L1 orthographies, and those word recognition mechanisms are transferred into L2 English word recognition.