Interference Effect Of English On Chinese EFL Children's Pin Yin: A Connectionist Account

In this study, we conducted an experiment to see if knowledge of English letter names, phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and words interferes with the Pin Yin performance of Chinese young learners who start English and Pin Yin simultaneously; and whether the interference, if it does occur, can be avoided or reduced if children postpone English spelling learning or total English learning until their Pin Yin is fairly consolidated.The experiment involved two tasks. Task 1 required subjects to write Pin Yin above a Chinese character when they heard its sound from the recorder. Task 2 asked subjects to judge if a given Pin Yin was the correct Pin Yin form for a following bracketed Chinese character. The materials were selected to test interference from English letter names, phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and/or words with Pin Yin spelling and spelling recognition. Six groups of primary students took part in the experiment. Three of them were 2nd graders, and the other three, 4th graders. We found that subjects with English spelling experience in each grade made significantly more EM errors (English knowledge-motivated errors) than their monolingual controls; but not subjects with only 1.25 years' English reading experience. We also found that the group in grade 2 who had been learning English spelling in addition to reading produced more EM errors than the group who had been learning English reading only. However, no such results were found for the group in grade 4 who had 2 more years' English reading experience relative to the other group with English experience in the same grade. A third finding of our study was that the 4th graders with 1.25 years' English reading and spelling experience produced no less EM errors than the 2nd graders with the same amount of English experience.These findings suggest that (1) knowledge of English letter names, phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and words, when reaching a certain threshold, can interfere with Chinese EFL children's Pin Yin performance; (2) English spelling experience is more liable to cause such interference than English reading experience; and (3) postponing English learning cannot reduce or avoid this interference.We explained our findings within the connectionist framework in terms of competition and inhibition between connections in the two systems (English and Pin Yin) of a bilingual. Outputs with stronger connections to inputs are activated first. And when English connections are stronger, they will win the competition and cause errors in Pin Yin performance.