Do differences among first languages (LI) affect word recognition in reading a second language (L2)? Participants in this study had either Indonesian (an alphabetic language) or Chinese (a logographic language) as an L1 and were learning English (an alphabetic language) as an L2. Under the connectionist rubric, it was predicted that an alphabetic LI would facilitate word recognition in an alphabetic L2, especially if the LI and L2 have similar spelling patterns. Facilitation is relative to a logographic LI. The model also predicted a better recognition for high-frequency words in the L2 relative to low-frequency words. The results of a lexical decision task largely confirmed these hypotheses.Understanding the development of word recognition skills is of critical importance in second language (L2) reading research. Reading is a complex task, involving a number of subcomponent processes. In order to gain fluency, therefore, many subcomponent processing skills -those at lower levels in particular -must become automated. In addition, a majority of L2 readers must cope with the change from one orthographic system to another. Hence, we can expect that LI processing skills, however well developed, are not readily available during L2 processing without substantial adjustments among L2 learners from structurally different LI orthographic backgrounds. It is conceivable, then, that L2 word recognition is facilitated to the extent that the LI orthographic systems are typologically related to the L2 system.Currently, three types of orthographies are in use: Iogography, syllabary, and alphabet. In logography, one graphemic unit normally represents an entire word or morpheme. The representational unit in the other two systems, in contrast, is an intraword segment -a syllable in the syllabary and a phoneme in the alpha-

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Results showed that free-viewing eye movement measures, in which participants are not instructed to look at anything in particular, hold promise as valid indicators of priming effects. Further research in this area will help to advance language-processing theories in individuals with and without language impairment.

When discriminating between unknown foreign languages, infants, young children, and adult listeners are able to make same-language/different-language discrimination judgments at better than chance levels. In these studies (Lorch & Meara, 1989; Mehler et al., 1988; Stockmal, 1995), foreign language samples have often been provided by different talkers, confounding voice characteristics and language characteristics. In Experiments 1 and 2, using the same talkers for different pairs of languages, we found that listeners were able to discriminate between languages they did not know, even when spoken by the same talker. That is, listeners were able to separate talker from language characteristics. Experiment 3 used multidimensional scaling to explore the bases of listener judgments. Listeners were attentive to prosodic properties and influenced by their familiarity with the test languages.

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