Impact of Multimodal Cognitive Processes on Second Language Acquisition

Second Language (L2) speech perception is believed to be a function of the perceived distance between the second and first languages (L1). Graphic influence on the orthography during the learning experience of a series of L1 sounds, though understudied, can play an equally important role in L1-L2 perceptual assimilation. The present study attests the hypothesis that early-age orthographic anchors, or inputs, can interplay with L1 phonology and affect the perception of L2 on a level parallel to phonetic percepts. We have recruited 70 English-learning subjects from China, whom had acquired Chinese through the pinyin Romanization system when started school, to perform a perceptual identification task of categorizing English phonemes as Mandarin ones. We have thus harvested participants' identification mappings together with subjective appraisal of the goodness of mappings. The findings show that learners performed in certain tasks significantly inaccurate and yet highly confident in identifications where graphic confusions of English-Chinese existed, but not in others. And the effect is clearly separate from acoustic distances between L1-L2, affirming our hypothesis. The study has significant implications on the theorizing of human speech perception and language education policy.