Does the Phonology of L1 Show Up in L2 Texts?

Garrett Nicolai, Grzegorz Kondrak

Abstract: The relative frequencies of character bigrams appear to contain much information for predicting the first language (L1) of the writer of a text in another language (L2). Tsur and Rappoport (2007) interpret this fact as evidence that word choice is dictated by the phonology of L1. In order to test their hypothesis, we design an algorithm to identify the most discriminative words and the corresponding character bigrams, and perform two experiments to quantify their impact on the L1 identification task. The results strongly suggest an alternative explanation of the effectiveness of character bigrams in identifying the native language of a writer.