Abstract
We report the results of two event-related potential (ERP) experiments in which Spanish learners of French and native French controls show graded sensitivity to verbal inflectional errors as a function of the presence of orthographic and/or phonological cues when reading silently in French. In both experiments, verbal agreement was manipulated in sentential context such that subject verb agreement was either correct, ill-formed and orally realized, involving both orthographic and phonological cues, or ill-formed and silent which involved only orthographic cues. The results of both experiments revealed more robust ERP responses to orally realized than to silent inflectional errors. This was true for L2 learners as well as native controls, although the effect in the learner group was reduced in comparison to the native group. In addition, the combined influence of phonological and orthographic cues led to the largest differences between syntactic/phonological conditions. Overall, the results suggest that the presence of phonological cues may enhance L2 readers’ sensitivity to morphology but that such may appear in L2 processing only when sufficient proficiency is attained. Moreover, both orthographic and phonological cues are used when available.
Highlights
Can one reed a book? whether or not one necessarily activates phonological representations when reading and accessing the meaning of a word is a long standing debate in reading research (McCusker et al, 1981; Morris and Folk, 2000; Harm and Seidenberg, 2004)
The difference in the percentage of correct responses for silent errors compared to orally realized errors and correct inflections was bigger in the native French speakers in comparison to that observed in Spanish L1–French L2 learners [mean percentage of correct detections for correct sentences, orally realized and silent errors were for native French speakers 93% (SD 3.1), 96% (SD 2.9), and 72% (SD 8.1), respectively, and for Spanish L1–French L2 learners 91% (SD 3.4), 89% (SD 5.6), and 82% (6.1), respectively]
Realized errors were better detected than silent errors and this was true for both participant groups [mean percentage of correct detections for correct sentences, orally realized and silent errors were 94% (SD 2.3), 92% (SD 3.5), and 73% (SD 8.2) for native French speakers and 89% (SD 4.7), 86% (SD 6.4), and 61% (SD 15.9) for Spanish L1–French L2 learners, respectively]
Summary
Whether or not one necessarily activates phonological representations when reading and accessing the meaning of a word is a long standing debate in reading research (McCusker et al, 1981; Morris and Folk, 2000; Harm and Seidenberg, 2004). Theories assumed that phonological recoding was a secondary, slower, route to meaning as compared to “direct access” via orthographic codes alone (Paap and Noel, 1991). This view has been seriously challenged in the last 15 years. Said findings have since been replicated using event-related potentials (ERPs; Grainger et al, 2006)
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