THE USE OF PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING WAS INVESTIGATED, SPECIFICALLY AS TRANSCRIPTION FACILITATES AUDITORY-VISUAL RECOGNITION OF RUSSIAN SOUNDS AND SCRIPT. PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION SERVED IN THIS STUDY AS THE MEDIATING AGENT BETWEEN RUSSIAN SOUNDS AND CYRILLIC SCRIPT. THE LEARNING PROCESS WAS SET UP ON A MEDIATION CHAIN OF THREE ELEMENTS IN THE ORDER OF (1) AUDITORY STIMULUS OF RUSSIAN WORDS AND PHRASES OVER A TAPE RECORDER, (2) VISUAL STIMULUS OF THE SAME WORDS AND PHRASES, USING ROMAN SCRIPT FOR PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION, AND (3) VISUAL STIMULUS OF THE SAME WORDS AND PHRASES AGAIN, USING CYRILLIC CHARACTERS. TO EVALUATE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE ROMAN TRANSCRIPTIONS IN THE LEARNING PROCESS, TWO EXPERIMENTS WERE RUN--(1) ONE GROUP OF SUBJECTS WAS GIVEN TRAINING LISTS WITH THE TRANSCRIPTION PRINTED ABOVE EACH WORD, AND A SECOND GROUP LEARNED WITHOUT TRANSCRIPTION. AFTER FOUR EXPERIMENTAL SESSIONS, BOTH GROUPS WERE TESTED WITHOUT TRANSCRIPTION, (2) TRANSCRIPTION WAS UNDEREMPHASIZED IN THIS EXPERIMENT BY PRESENTING IT IN ONLY ONE-HALF OF THE TRIALS. COLLEGE-LEVEL STUDENTS WERE THE SUBJECTS OF THESE EXPERIMENTS. IN BOTH EXPERIMENTS, PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION APPEARED TO BE OF LIMITED VALUE IN FACILITATING THE LEARNING OF RUSSIAN. (JH)