Testing the interdependence hypothesis among native adult bilingual Russian-English students

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• English features an opaque orthography, while Russian is a more direct letter-sound system.
• Understanding cross-orthographic transfer is crucial for effective second language pedagogy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between reading, syntactic, orthographic, and working memory skills in Russian and English.
• To examine how skills in the first language (Russian) predict performance in the second language (English).

Main Methods:

• Participants: First-year English BA students (25-30 years old) educated in Russia.
• Testing: Individual assessments in Russian and English covering working memory, spelling, oral cloze, visual and phonological processing, orthographic skills, word attack, and word identification.
• Analysis: Correlation and multiple regression procedures.

Main Results:

• Significant positive correlations were found within and across languages for most linguistic skills.
• Orthographic skills showed strong within-language correlations but not across languages.
• Russian phonological and spelling skills were significant predictors of English word identification.

Conclusions:

• Linguistic skills, particularly phonological and spelling, demonstrate interdependence across different orthographies.
• Findings support the interdependence hypothesis, suggesting a transfer of foundational literacy skills from L1 to L2.
• The study underscores the importance of first language literacy in second language reading acquisition.