Abstract
AbstractOrthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-phoneme correspondences influence bilingual speech perception and production, even when both languages have been acquired in early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque and Basque–Spanish early bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque pseudowords created by replacing Basque /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take the same orthographic form, <z>. Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks in Basque and Spanish to test whether speech sounds with the same orthographic form were produced similarly in the two languages. Results for both groups showed orthography had strong effects on speech perception but no effects on speech production. Taken together, these findings suggest that orthography plays a crucial role in the speech system of early bilinguals but does not automatically lead to non-native production.
Highlights
When bilinguals acquire the phonological and phonetic systems of their two languages, they are generally confronted with phoneme inventories that overlap to some degree
Both L2-Basque and L1-Basque speakers were less accurate in rejecting words with orthographic than control mispronunciations
L2-Basque speakers performed at chance when responding to orthographic mispronunciations (54% accuracy)
Summary
When bilinguals acquire the phonological and phonetic systems of their two languages, they are generally confronted with phoneme inventories that overlap to some degree. Samuel and Larraza (2015) found that Spanish–Basque early bilinguals did not always distinguish the unique Basque affricate /ts / from the affricate /tʃ/, which exists in both Basque and Spanish. Among other tasks, they had Spanish–Basque early bilinguals perform an auditory lexical decision task (LDT). Participants accepted mispronunciations as real words in about 30% of all cases To investigate whether this was due to a perceptual deficit, participants performed an AXB discrimination task testing their ability to auditorily discriminate the critical sounds embedded in meaningless syllables.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call