Oldal 46 [46]
HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
3.6 THE INFLUENCE OF LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS
ON LISTENING COMPREHENSION
This section will summarise an article by Ringbom (1992), which shows how
positive transfer and the lack of positive transfer may affect the acquisition of
listening comprehension.
Ringbom defines transfer as the influence of L1-based elements and L1-based
procedures in understanding and producing L2 text. He points out the fact
that studies of transfer usually focus on negative transfer in production, and
the effects of positive transfer and transfer in comprehension are neglected.
Positive transfer has been studied in reading comprehension (RC). In lan¬
guages that are closely related, cognates reduce learning effort and facilitate
RC, since lexical and grammatical cognates act as potential vocabulary and
potential grammatical knowledge.
In listening comprehension (LC) positive lexical transfer is less easy. Words
are less recognisable in speech; dialect and certain aspects of connected speech
make it more difficult to recognise words, and there are also pressing time
constraints. LC is a more integrated, less divisible skillthan RC, in which the
unitary skill factor is more dominant than the composite parts of the skill.
Ringbom found that the English RC scores of Swedish-speaking Finns (i.e.,
ethnic Swedes living in Finland) were better than those of Finnish-speaking
Finns. This is easy to understand, since Swedish and English are related lan¬
guages: there are many similarities in grammatical structure and there are
many cognate words between the two languages.
However, there was an even greater difference in favour of Swedish-speaking
Finns in English LC. Apparently, listening tests pose particularly difficult prob¬
lems for Finns. The difficulty, Ringbom claims, is not due to phonological differ¬
ences: although such differences are considerable, they are not decisive. For LC,
the most important differences are related to the suprasegmental features of
Finnish. In Finnish, like in Hungarian, word stress is invariable (always on the
first syllable); there is vowel harmony, while word-initial and word-final conso¬
nant clusters are absent. As a result, word boundaries are exceptionally clear in
Finnish. Recognising word boundaries automatically and effortlessly is proce¬
dural knowledge,”® enabling speakers/hearers to understand connected speech.
Procedural knowledge is automatised, unconscious knowledge that enables people to do
something: to walk, to ride a bicycle, to drive a car, etc. Speaking one’s native language depends
on procedural knowledge: we produce grammatically and semantically correct sentences
without thinking of the rules of Hungarian grammar. Procedural knowledge is knowledge how
to do something, and is acquired gradually, through practice. As against this, declarative
knowledge is explicit, conscious, that can be acquired by learning (knowledge that). Learning
the rules of Hungarian grammar at school will equip us with declarative knowledge — we can
recite it in an examination, but we can speak Hungarian according to the grammatical rules
of Hungarian even if we are not aware of a single rule, from age 2+ on.
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