Orthography plays a limited role when learning the phonological forms of new words : the case of Spanish and English learners of novel Dutch words

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    36 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Some previous studies have shown that the availability of orthographic information leads to positive effects for second language (L2) phonology, while others document negative effects. In this paper, we examine the role of orthography on novel spoken-word learning by comparing word pairs that differed in most or all of their segments (nonminimal pairs) and those that only differed in one phoneme (minimal pairs) that was considered easy or difficult to discriminate. We tested the performance of learners whose native languages have transparent orthographies as well as learners with opaque orthographies. Our findings show that regardless of linguistic background and native orthographic system, availability of orthographic information during word learning did not have an effect on nonminimal pairs or perceptually easy minimal pairs. However, it had a positive effect on two minimal pairs that had the highest accuracy among the seven perceptually difficult ones, indicating that orthography only helped contrasts that were relatively easy to discriminate. The implications of these findings for L2 teaching and for future directions within L2 phonology are discussed.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)7-22
    Number of pages16
    JournalApplied Psycholinguistics
    Volume36
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Keywords

    • orthography
    • phonology
    • second language acquisition

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