The role of orthographic information in the learning of allophonic variation

Abstract

Exposure to L2 orthography may facilitate learning a novel vocalic (e.g., Escudero et al., 2008) or tonal (Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013) L2 contrast. Yet it is unclear whether the benefit of orthographic information applies to the learning of L2 words involving allophonic variants. We investigated whether exposure to L2 orthography can help L2 learners establish a single lexical representation for words containing allophones. We used an invented language, with word-pairs of free variants (test condition) involving the vowel alternation [ɔ]-[u], both of which can be spelled as <o>. In the control condition, vowel alternation [e]-[a] contrasted word meanings. In a word learning experiment, Mandarin and American English speakers were presented with words paired with pictures. In addition, one subgroup of participants saw the spellings when they heard the words, while another did not. Then, in a picture-auditory word matching task, participants who learned that the variants were allophonic were expected to link the two variants to one single picture in the test condition only, not in the control. A facilitative effect of orthography on the learning of free variation was observed for Mandarin speakers. This shows that orthography may help L2 learners establish a single lexical representation for allophonic variants.