Sound Segmentation is Orthography-Specific: Evidence from Hindi-, Kannada- and Malayalam-English Bilinguals

1. Sound Segmentation is Orthography-Specific: Evidence from Hindi-, Kannada- and Malayalam-English Bilinguals Jyotsna Vaid, Chaitra Rao, Catherine Koola & Sumeyra Tosun Texas A&M University

2. Overview • Language researchers have long held the view that literacy profoundly impacts the perception of the units of spoken language (Francis, 1999; Morais, Bertelson, Cary & Alegria, 1986; Olson, 1994). • Ben-Dror, Bentin and Frost (1995) found that Hebrew-English bilinguals interpreted the ‘initial sound’ of cross-language homophones to be phonemes for stimuli presented as English but as CV segments when the same stimuli were presented as Hebrew. • An investigation of sound deletion patterns for cross-language homophones in skilled readers of Hindi vs. English similarly revealed a phoneme-based preference for English but a syllable-based preference for Hindi words (Vaid, 2002; Vaid, Gupta & Chen, 2005).

3. Present Research • Three experiments were conducted to assess 1) whether a syllable-based segmentation preference in sound deletion previously observed for Hindi (an Indo-European language) generalizes to two non-Indo-European Indic languages, and 2) whether the preference is attributable to knowledge of the spoken language or the script. • Experiments 1, 2 and 3 tested bilingual readers of Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam respectively, in their native language as well as in English. • Although the three Indic languages are written in different scripts, they are all alphasyllabries and have the akshara as the basic unit. Aksharas typically refer to CV segments that contain either an implicit schwa or diacritics ligatured to the main consonant character (see examples on next slide).

4. Hindi Kannada Malayalam Sample written symbols Hindi Kannada Malayalam

5. Rationale • Bilinguals’ responses to a task requiring deletion of ‘the initial sound’ of a spoken word were expected to reflect the different types of mapping of sounds to symbols in their respective languages: phoneme-based for English and largely syllable-based for the Indic languages. • Due to the differential graphemic representation of vowels in Indic scripts (i.e., full form for word-initial position and implicit or in diacritic form for other positions), it was expected that ‘initial sound’ would be construed as a phoneme for vowel-initial relative to vowel-medial words, and for consonant-cluster-initial words relative to CVC structure words. • In Exp. 3, where participants were subdivided on the basis of literacy in Malayalam, it was anticipated that bilinguals who were not literate in Malayalam would segment Malayalam words in the same way as they segmented English homophones, i.e., as phonemes.

6. Method • Participants. Exp. 1: 13 Hindi/English biliterate bilinguals; Exp. 2: 10 Kannada/English biliterate bilinguals, and Exp. 3: 28 Malayalam/English biliterate readers and 10 monoliterate English Malayalam/English bilinguals. • Materials. • Exp. 1: Stimuli were 45 Hindi-English homophones (e.g., such, meaning truth in Hindi). They included 16 vowel-initial, 19 consonant-initial, and 12 consonant-cluster-initial words. Nineteen words were monosyllabic and 26 were bisyllabic. • Exp. 2: Stimuli were 20 Kannada-English homophones (e.g., gory, Kannada meaning: tomb), including four vowel-initial, ten consonant-initial and six consonant cluster-initial words, all bisyllabic. • Exp. 3: Stimuli were 34 Malayalam-English homophones (e.g., pony, Malayalam meaning: gold), including 7 vowel-initial, 21 consonant-initial and 6 consonant cluster-initial words. 28 words were bisyllabic and 6 were trisyllabic.

7. Method • Procedure • Upon hearing a word, participants were instructed to mentally remove “the first sound” and to say aloud what remained. • Homophones recorded by native speakers of each language were presented in separate, self-paced, counterbalanced language blocks. • Mean percent phoneme deletions were computed per item type in each language.

8. Sound Deletion Across Languages by Syllable Structure

9. Sound deletion in Malayalam-English speakers as a function of literacy in Malayalam

10. Results • Experiment 1 (Hindi/English): • 2 (Language) × 3 (Item Type) ANOVA yielded a main effect of Language, showing higher phoneme-based deletion in English than in Hindi, and a Language × Item Type interaction, showing more deletions on Hindi vowel-initial than on consonant-initial and consonant-cluster-initial words. • Experiment 2 (Kannada/English): • 2 (Language) × 3 (Item Type) ANOVA revealed no effect of Language (F < 1), and a main effect of Item Type, with significantly more phoneme deletions on vowel-initial than consonant-initial and consonant-cluster-initial words in both Kannada and English. • Experiment 3 (Malayalam/English): • 2 (Language) × 2 (Syllable Length: one, two) × 2 (Group: biliterate, uniliterate) × 2 (Order: Malayalam-first, English-first) ANOVA yielded main effects of Language, Syllable Length, and Order. Crucially, a significant Language × Group interaction revealed that in the unilterate (English) group, phoneme deletion for Malayalam words was higher than that among the biliterate group.

11. Discussion • Our findings extend previous studies (Ben-Dror et al., 1995; Vaid et al., 2005) in showing that sound segmentation in bilinguals varies as a function of language: • for English words the basic unit of a spoken word is taken to be a phoneme (particularly in Hindi- and Malayalam-English speakers), whereas Hindi, Kannada, and Malayalam homophones of the English words elicit a syllable-based unit, especially for words with a CV syllable structure. • Phoneme-level perception of “the initial sound” of words in Indic languages depends on the words’ syllable structure, being higher for VC and CCV words than for CV or CVC words, reflecting orthographic properties of these languages. • The script-based nature of sound segmentation is strongly supported by the finding in Exp. 3 that Malayalam/English bilinguals who were literate only in English segmented both Malayalam and English words phonemically, whereas those who were biliterate in Malayalam/English segmented the Malayalam words syllabically.

12. Key References • Ben-Dror, I., Frost, R., & Bentin, S. (1995) Orthographic representation and phonemic segmentation in skilled readers: A cross-language comparison. Psychological Science, 6, 176-181. • Francis, N. (1999). Bilingualism, writing and metalinguistic awareness: Oral-literate interactions between first and second languages. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 533-561. • Koola, C., Vaid, J., Tosun, S., & Rao, C. (2009, October). Literacy affects segmentation of cross-language homophones: Evidence from Malayalam-English bilinguals. Poster, ARMADILLO: Southwest Cognition Conference, Rice University, Houston. • Morais, J., Bertelson, P., Cary, L., & Alegria, J. (1986). Literacy training and speech segmentation. Cognition, 24, 45–64. • Rao, C. & Vaid, J. (2005, September). Does orthographic experience influence sound segmentation?Poster, Psychology Department, Texas A&M University. • Vaid, J. (2002, December). Reading across orthographies. Poster presentation, AILA (International Association for Applied Linguistics), Singapore. • Vaid, J., Gupta, A., & Chen, H.C. (2005). Sound deletion in Hindi-English bilinguals. Unpublished manuscript, Texas A&M University.