The impact of the cognitive effects of L1 orthographic depth and morphological complexity on L2 French morphographic processing

Abstract

Abstract Orthographic depth has been shown to influence the default orthographic processing mechanisms. However, the question of the impact of L1 orthographic depth on the processing of L2 orthography is still open. Crucially, current studies on orthographic depth tend to focus on the processing of simple words and do not consider other factors that interact with orthographic depth, such as morphological complexity. Our study is a preliminary investigation of whether the processing of L2 written inflected words shows crosslinguistic cognitive transfer effects of L1 orthographic depth and L1 morphological complexity. We focus on homophonic vs. heterophonic French subject-verb agreement (arrive / arrivent [aʁiv] (‘arrives’ (3sg) / ‘arrive’ (3pl)) vs. part [paʁ] / partent [paʁt] (‘leaves’ (3sg) / ‘leave’ (3pl)) in two groups of experienced L2 French learners whose L1 is Spanish or Italian (both exhibiting shallow orthography and complex morphology) vs. English (exhibiting deep orthography and simple morphology). Results suggest that during the processing of L2 written inflected words, L2 learners whose L1 is morphologically complex with shallow orthography rely more on orthography-oriented morphological (sub-lexical) processing; whilst L2 learners whose L1 is morphologically simple with deep orthography rely more on phonology-oriented lexical processing.