Intercultural written communication: Bilingual reading of texts written in alphabetic and logographic writing systems

Abstract

Due to the ever-increasing amounts of textual information and the pervasiveness of written communication, the problems of perception and interpretation of foreign texts are getting a lot of attention in today's research of intercultural communication. Fundamentally, the writing systems of modern Slavic languages are alphabetic. In such systems, a grapheme is used to represent a phoneme in writing. On the other hand, in logographic writing systems such as Chinese each grapheme represents a morpheme or a word. That increases the total amount of writing units used. In addition, Chinese writing is more densely packed and uses no interword spacing that helps direct saccades from one word to another in alphabetic writing systems. The present article examines the subject of bilingual reading of Russian alphabetic and Chinese logographic texts by L2 learners. We suppose that the issue of switching between reading in two writing systems is more pronounced in the context of late L2 acquisition. In order to establish the changes in reading processes that the readers undergo when they switch to reading in a different writing system we set up an experiment in which 31 Russian-Chinese and 28 Chinese-Russian bilinguals with different degrees of proficiency in L2 read both in Chinese and Russian. The eye movements were recorded using an SMI RED 500 eye-tracking system. We found that the eye movement measures of the Chinese participants reading Russian texts approached those of the Russian native speakers. This result indicates that Chinese readers of Russian use their pre-existing skills of reading in alphabetic writing systems that were developed due to early exposure to Latin-based pinyin and the English alphabet. The Russian participants lacking any sort of early exposure to logographic writing systems displayed results largely inferior to those of the Chinese native speakers.