Language Transfer: Dominant Channels in Perception

Abstract

The paper covers a range of issues related to the specifics of Russian language mastering by Indian students studying in English and Russian. The research is based on an integrative methodological platform that combines approaches to multilingualism formation from the standpoint of psychological linguistics, cognitive linguistics, the theory of language contacts, discourse and communication science. The research involves the techniques of psychological and semantic analyses and verbal associations, the methods of contextual analysis and comparison. The material of the paper is the data obtained from online surveys of Indian students who have been studying at universities in North Ossetia-Alania for six years (elementary and pre-intermediate levels of Russian language proficiency). The study is aimed at identifying perception channels that represent the features of foreign students cognitive style in the Russian natural environment, descripting level-by-level interfering influence of native languages and weak interference of English. Based on text fragments and lexical units, vectors and methods of interlingual interference were demonstrated, its leading types were determined, that are phonetic, phonemic, graphemic, phonemic-graphemic, morphological and lexical. The role of English as a communicative mediator is defined. The analysis done confirmed complex application of auditory, visual and kinesthetic channels at the information input, and revealed the dominance of the auditory perception channel at the information output while learning the Russian language by Indian students. The Indian students cognitive style tends to be simplified through contamination of written and oral speech, compression, abbreviations usage, intensification of associative and semantic links. Strategies for using Internet translation, imitation of mastering the Russian language, literal translation from English into Russian, strategies for the implementation of graphic, phonetic-graphic principles of writing, phonemic and grammatical reduction were identified as the basic communication strategies of Indian students learning Russian.