Orthographic activation in spoken word recognition of L2 phonological variants (original) (raw)
Related papers
Automatic activation of orthography in spoken word recognition: Pseudohomograph priming
Journal of Memory and Language, 2008
There is increasing evidence that orthographic information has an impact on spoken word processing. However, much of this evidence comes from tasks that are subject to strategic effects. In the three experiments reported here, we examined activation of orthographic information during spoken word processing within a paradigm that is unlikely to involve strategic factors, namely auditory priming where the relationship between prime and target was masked from awareness. Specifically, we examined whether auditory primes that were homographic with their spoken targets (e.g., the pseudohomograph /dri:d/, which can be spelled the same as the target word "dread") produced greater facilitation than primes that were equally phonologically related to their targets but could not be spelled the same as them (e.g. /šri:d/ followed by the spoken word "shred"). Two auditory lexical decision experiments produced clear pseudohomograph priming even though the participants were unaware of the orthographic relationship between the primes and targets. A task that required participants to merely repeat the spoken target revealed an effect of orthography on error rates, but not on latencies. It was concluded that, in literate adults, orthography is important in speech recognition in the same way that phonology is important in reading.
Mandarin Chinese has two orthographic systems: Chinese characters and Pinyin. While Pinyin is transparent to Mandarin pronunciation, characters are opaque and seldom relate to sound. This study aims to find out the effect of these two systems on Cantonese listeners who are L2 learners of Mandarin. Native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers participated in word recognition experiments which included a monosyllabic task and a disyllabic task. The results show that Cantonese listeners most often confused T1 and T4, and T2 and T3 in Mandarin. Pinyin and characters have influence on the perception of Cantonese listeners. While Pinyin facilitates the recognition in the monosyllabic task, but characters facilitate the disyllabic task, indicating the two tasks may have involved different processes.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1996
This paper examines the effects of a first language (L1) orthographic system on second language (L2) word recognition strategies. Lexical judgment tests using Japanese kana (a syllabic script consisting of hiragana and katakana) were given to native English and native Chinese learners of Japanese. The visual familiarity and length in test words were controlled to examine the involvement of phonological or visual coding in word recognition strategies. The responses of the English and Chinese subjects were compared on the basis of observed reaction time. The results indicated that (a) Chinese subjects relied more on the visual information in L2 Japanese kana words than did English subjects and (b) English subjects utilized the phonological information in Japanese kana words more than did Chinese subjects. Accordingly, these findings demonstrate that native speakers of English and Chinese utilize different word recognition strategies due to L1 orthographic characteristics, and such L1 word recognition strategies are transferred into L2 Japanese kana word recognition.
Orthographic Representations in Spoken Word Priming: No Early Automatic Activation
Language and Speech, 2007
The current study investigated the modulation by orthographic knowledge of the final overlap phonological priming effect, contrasting spoken prime-target pairs with congruent spellings (e.g., "carreau-bourreau", /karo/-/buro/) to pairs with incongruent spellings (e.g., "zéro-bourreau", /zero/-/buro/). Using a material and a design aimed at reducing the impact of response biases or strategies, no orthographic congruency effect was found in shadowing, a speech recognition task that can be performed prelexically. In lexical decision, an orthographic effect occurred only when the processing environment reduced the prominence of phonological overlap and thus induced participants to rely on word spelling. Overall, the data do not support the assumption of an early, automatic activation of orthographic representations during spoken word recognition. KEYWORDS: Spoken word recognition, Orthographic priming, Phonological priming, Levels of speech processing, Orthography and speech processing Priming effect* 44 53 -1,2 2,9 63 -0,7 Related Related RTs %correct RTs * Speed or accuracy advantage observed in the related condition in comparison to the unrelated condition.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
The use of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word recognition was studied in a visual world task where L1 Finnish learners of L2 French (n = 64) and L1 French native speakers (n = 24) were asked to match spoken word forms with printed words while their eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1, French target words were contrasted with competitors having a longer ( vs. ) or a shorter word initial phonological overlap ( vs. ) and an identical orthographic overlap. In Experiment 2, target words were contrasted with competitors of either longer ( vs. ) or shorter word initial orthographic overlap ( vs. ) and of an identical phonological overlap. A general phonological effect was observed in the L2 listener group but not in the L1 control group. No general orthographic effects were observed in the L2 or L1 groups, but a significant effect of proficiency was observed for orthographic overlap over time: higher proficiency L2 listeners used also orthographic information in the matching task in a time-window from 400 to 700 ms, whereas no such effect was observed for lower proficiency listeners. These results suggest that the activation of orthographic information in L2 spoken word recognition depends on proficiency in L2.
Phonology and orthography in reading aloud
Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2007
Visual word recognition comprises the processes involved in identifying a word-for instance, during reading (see, e.g., . One important theoretical issue in visual word recognition concerns the role of phonology (see , for a review). In principle, the orthographic representation could be enough to recognize visually presented words. However, it has been shown that the phonology of words also has a considerable impact on visual word recognition. For instance, showed that phonological neighborhood influenced visual word perception (see also . In a visual lexical decision task, participants responded more rapidly and accurately to words with larger phonological neighborhoods than to those with smaller neighborhoods. Presumably, words with many phonological neighbors lead to a stronger pattern of activation at the phonological level than words with fewer neighbors. This activation pattern is an indication for the word recognition system that a letter string is a word, thus allowing faster responses. concluded that their results demonstrate the importance of phonological codes when processing letter strings. Yates (2005) replicated these findings using the naming and semantic categorization tasks.
This paper provides evidence that the second language orthographic input affects the mental representations of L2 phonology in instructed beginner L2 learners. Previous research has shown that orthographic representations affect monolinguals' performance in phonological awareness tasks; in instructed L2 learners such representations could also affect pronunciation. This study looked at the phonological representations of Chinese rimes in beginner learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language, using a phoneme counting task and a phoneme segmentation task. Results show that learners do not count or segment the main vowel in those syllables where it is not represented in the pinyin (romanisation) orthographic representations. It appears that the pinyin orthographic input is reinterpreted according to L1 phonology-orthography correspondences, and interacts with the phonological input in shaping the phonological representations of Chinese syllables in beginner learners. This explains previous findings that learners of Chinese do not pronounce the main vowel in these syllables. INTRODUCTION The role of the orthographic input in the acquisition of second language phonology has been hitherto almost completely neglected. On the one hand, research on monolingual speakers shows that their performance in phonological awareness tasks is affected by orthographic representations. On the other hand, research on second language (L2) learners shows that their L2 pronunciation is affected by L2 orthographic representations. Do L2 orthographic representations affect the mental representations of L2 phonology in L2 learners, such leading to non-target-like pronunciations? This paper looks at the effects of some orthographic conventions of the pinyin romanization system on the phonological representations of Chinese syllables in instructed beginner learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). It is proposed that the non-target-like pronunciation of some syllables by CFL learners can be attributed to the effects of the pinyin orthographic representations on learners' L2 phonological representations.
1999
This study investigated the possible effects of first language (L1) orthographic characteristics on word recognition in English as a second language (ESL). Case alternation was used to examine the impact of visually distorted words of different types on fluent ESL readers' word recognition in naming. Visual distortion of word shape (i.e., cAsE aLtErNaTiOn) was utilized because, although visually distorted words have lost word-shape cues, they preserve the cue value of words (i.e., spelling patterns). It, therefore, was hypothesized that if one is sensitive to alphabetic orthography, or if one's inner mechanism of processing an alphabetic word is efficient, then the visual disruption of word-shape cues should not affect one's sensitivity to sequences of letters in words. In other words, this study focused on the magnitude of the effect of case alternation in word recognition as an index of the sensitivity to alphabetic words. Results showed that the magnitude of the case alternation effect in a naming task was significantly larger for the ESL participants whose L1 is not alphabetic (i.e., Chinese and Japanese) than the ESL participants whose L1 is alphabetic (i.e., Iranians-Persian as L1). This result seems to indicate that the Persian speakers, due to the facilitating influence of their L1 orthography, were less influenced by case alternation than the Chinese and Japanese speakers, whose L1 orthographies are not alphabetic. This finding suggests that the first language orthographic features affect the orthographic coding mechanisms (i.e., word recognition mechanisms) in a second language.
Effects of Orthographic Forms on the Acquisition of Novel Spoken Words in a Second Language
Frontiers in Communication, 2019
The orthographic forms of words (spellings) can affect word production in speakers of second languages. This study tested whether presenting orthographic forms during L2 word learning can lead speakers to learn non-nativelike phonological forms of L2 words, as reflected in production and metalinguistic awareness. Italian L1 learners of English as a Second Language (English L2) were exposed to English L2 novel spoken words (pseudowords) and real words in association with pictures either from auditory input only (Phonology group), or from both auditory and orthographic input (Phonology & Orthography group, both groups n = 24). Pseudowords and words were designed to obtain 30 semi-minimal pairs, each consisting of a word and a pseudoword that contained the same target consonant, spelled with one letter or with double letters. In Italian double consonant letters represent a long consonant, whereas the English language does not contrast short and long consonants. After the learning phase, participants performed a production task (picture naming), a metalinguistic awareness task (rhyme judgment) and a spelling task. Results showed that the Phonology & Orthography group produced the same consonant as longer in double-letter than in single-letter lexical items, while this was not the case for the Phonology group. The former group also rejected spoken rhymes that contained the same consonant spelled with a single letter in one word and double letters in the other, because they considered these as two different phonological categories. Finally, the Phonology & Orthography group learned more novel words than the Phonology group, showing that orthographic input results in more word learning, in line with previous findings from native speakers.
Second languages (L2s) are often learned through spoken and written input, and L2 orthographic forms (spellings) can lead to non-native-like pronunciation. The present study investigated whether orthography can lead experienced learners of EnglishL2 to make a phonological contrast in their speech production that does not exist in English. Double consonants represent geminate (long) consonants in Italian but not in English. In Experiment 1, native English speakers and EnglishL2 speakers (Italians) were asked to read aloud English words spelled with a single or double target consonant letter, and consonant duration was compared. The EnglishL2 speakers produced the same consonant as shorter when it was spelled with a single letter, and longer when spelled with a double letter. Spelling did not affect consonant duration in native English speakers. In Experiment 2, effects of orthographic input were investigated by comparing two groups of EnglishL2 speakers (Italians) performing a delayed word repetition task with or without orthographic input; the same orthographic effects were found in both groups. These results provide arguably the first evidence that L2 orthographic forms can lead experienced L2 speakers to make a contrast in their L2 production that does not exist in the language. The effect arises because L2 speakers are affected by the interaction between the L2 orthographic form (number of letters), and their native orthography–phonology mappings, whereby double consonant letters represent geminate consonants. These results have important implications for future studies investigating the effects of orthography on native phonology and for L2 phonological development models.