Does reading in an alphasyllabary affect phonemic awareness? Inherent schwa effects in Marathi-English bilinguals

Abstract

The extent to which speakers of alphasyllabaries develop phonemic awareness is unclear. In alphasyllabaries, diacritics are used to mark all vowels following consonants, except for the schwa vowel, which is inherent in every consonant, and is marked or unmarked depending on its position within a word. We used Marathi as an example alphasyllabary language to explore schwa awareness. We tested the awareness shown by Marathi-English bilinguals for the schwa vowel compared with awareness for marked vowels and with vowel awareness in English. In Marathi, participants were significantly more accurate at identifying initial schwas (expressed by a graph) than medial (unexpressed) or final schwas (expressed by a diacritic) and were more accurate at identifying other vowels in the medial or final positions than the schwa. Across languages, participants were significantly more likely to omit medial and final schwa vowels in Marathi than in English. The results suggest that biliterate speakers of alphasyllabaries have general awareness of phonemes but not inherent vowels. More generally, the results suggest that phonemic awareness depends specifically on the expression of the phoneme in writing, in alignment with previous research that shows literacy effects on phonemic awareness.

Keywords:

• Alphasyllabary
• Inherent vowel
• Bilingual
• Schwa
• Devanagari
• Phonemic awareness

We would like to thank Rajeev and Dnyanada Bhide for their help with the Marathi stimuli, Joseph Stafura and Elizabeth Hirshorn for helpful discussion, Lidia Zacharczuk for help coding the data, and Jon-Michel Seman and Thomas Byrne for their assistance with various tasks. The research reported here was partly supported by NSF PSLC [grant SBE08-36012].

We would like to thank Rajeev and Dnyanada Bhide for their help with the Marathi stimuli, Joseph Stafura and Elizabeth Hirshorn for helpful discussion, Lidia Zacharczuk for help coding the data, and Jon-Michel Seman and Thomas Byrne for their assistance with various tasks. The research reported here was partly supported by NSF PSLC [grant SBE08-36012].

Notes

¹ The tests can only be used for comparing participants within a language because we cannot confirm that the English and Marathi versions were equated for difficulty.

² Scoring was very lenient, both males and females of the same species (e.g. lion and lioness) and names and examples of a category (e.g. snake and python) were counted as correct.

³ The words were not homonyms, so context was not needed to spell them correctly.

⁴ Definitions were accepted in either English or Marathi, or the participants could use the words in a sentence.

⁵ Both Λ and ə were counted as schwas.

⁶ Diphthongs were scored as correct if they were pronounced as one vowel or as two.

⁷ 5-knew the meaning, used the word frequently; 4-knew the meaning, rarely used the word; 3-had a vague idea of what the word meant; 2-did not the meaning but the word sounded familiar; 1- never heard the word before

⁸ An anuswara on a final consonant indicates that the consonant is followed by a schwa; these stimuli were included. An anuswara above an initial or medial akshara indicates that the akshara is followed by a nasal; these stimuli were excluded.

⁹ The Greenhouse-Geisser correction was used because the sphericity assumption was violated.

¹⁰ Group four was not included in the following analyses because it only had one member.