Effects of orthography on monolingual and bilingual perception of non-native consonant clusters

Abstract

A critical skill for word decoding and reading development is that of orthographic processing, which refers to how orthographic symbols combine to represent word forms. Previous research has shown that the orthographic system of one's native-language (L1) influences second-language (L2) learning, however there is conflicting evidence regarding the effects of presenting learners with written input during the initial stages of word learning. Therefore, an explicit word-learning paradigm, with auditory-only and auditory-orthography conditions, was used to investigate whether Australian-English (AusE) monolinguals and bilinguals who spoke AusE and one other language could learn novel words containing non- native onset consonant clusters - sound structures that have not been largely studied. A follow- up phoneme deletion task assessed the participants' ability to manipulate the sounds of the newly learned words and determined whether participants used repair strategies to bring the non-native consonant clusters in line with their L1 phonotactics. Overall, word learning and phoneme deletion accuracy was similar across the language groups. In both tasks, those who received orthographic input during word learning significantly outperformed those who did not, however the facilitative effects of orthographic input varied across the word types.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English