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.