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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 languages 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 languages: 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 problems for Finns. The difficulty, Ringbom claims, is not due to phonological differences: 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 consonant clusters are absent. As a result, word boundaries are exceptionally clear in Finnish. Recognising word boundaries automatically and effortlessly is procedural 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. +. 44 »
