Influence Of Orthography Research Articles

The Effects of Orthography on the Pronunciation of Nasal Vowels by L1 Japanese Learners of L3 French: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Speech in Interaction

In recent decades, a vast literature has documented crosslinguistic influences on the acquisition of L2 phonology and in particular the effects of spelling on pronunciation. However, articulating these research findings in terms of taking into account the effects of L1 phonology and spelling on L2 pronunciation in language teaching remains to be examined. These studies are based on experimental cross-sectional methods and mainly focus on L2 English learning by speakers of languages with an alphabetic system. In French, there are few studies on crosslinguistic influences on the acquisition of the nasal vowels (/ɑ~/, /ↄ~/ and /ε~/) and few experimental studies that point to a possible effect of orthography on the pronunciation of these phonemes. The results of experimental studies are difficult to transpose to the language classroom because they are based on word or sentence reading and writing activities, which are quite far-removed from the conversational activities practised in the classroom in interaction with peers and the teacher. Hence, we opted here for a case study of the effect of spelling on the production of nasal vowels in interaction tasks. We conducted a longitudinal study during the first year of extensive learning of French (4 hrs 30 per week). The results of a perceptive analysis by expert listeners show that (i) learners spell nasal vowels with an <n> or <m> in 98% of the obligatory contexts; (ii) most nasal vowels are perceived as nasal vowels in speech (72%), the others being perceived as vowels followed by a nasal consonant (19, 5%) or as oral vowels (8.5%); (iii) consonantisation is stronger when the learner spontaneously produces a word than when (s)he repeats it, (iv) which decreases with time (learning effect) and varies (v) according to the consonant, /ε~/ being less consonantised than /ↄ~/ and /ɑ~/. Finaly, we propose a didactic discussion in the light of intelligibility and influence of orthography.

Orthography-phonology integration of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia: The mutual influence of orthography and phonology

Orthography-phonology integration of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia: The mutual influence of orthography and phonology

Phonetic Commentary on A.Kh. Vostokov’s Grammar Manuals: The Experience of Contemporary Understanding

The article gives a phonetic commentary on the grammar manuals of A.Kh. Vostokov (1781–1864), compiled by a scientist in 1831. Linguistic evidence of the realizations of the mutabil phoneme <г>, phoneme <ш’:>, which in the 19th century was still an affricate, and the pronunciation of the letter ѣ. The functions of the letters Ъ, Ь and Й are revealed: in the system of A.Kh. Vostokov they denote the sound [j], participate in the hardening and softening of previous consonants and alternations with vowels. The general approach of the researcher to the sound side of the Russian language is analyzed, for which we have attracted other works by Vostokov, where phonetic questions were raised. The influence of orthography on the perception of language is also considered: it had a decisive influence on the description of phonetics in the 19th century.

Spelling provides a precise (but sometimes misplaced) phonological target. Orthography and acoustic variability in second language word learning

L1 French participants learned novel L2 English words over two days of learning sessions, with half of the words presented with their orthographic forms (Audio-Ortho) and half without (Audio only). One group heard the words pronounced by a single talker, while another group heard them pronounced by multiple talkers. On the third day, they completed a variety of tasks to evaluate their learning. Our results show a robust influence of orthography, with faster response times in both production (Picture naming) and recognition (Picture mapping) tasks for words learned in the Audio-Ortho condition. Moreover, formant analyses of the Picture naming responses show that orthographic input pulls pronunciations of English novel words towards a non-native (French) phonological target. Words learned with their orthographic forms were pronounced more precisely (with smaller Dispersion Scores), but were misplaced in the vowel space (as reflected by smaller Euclidian distances with respect to French vowels). Finally, we found only limited evidence of an effect of talker-based acoustic variability: novel words learned with multiple talkers showed faster responses times in the Picture naming task, but only in the Audio-only condition, which suggests that orthographic information may have overwhelmed any advantage of talker-based acoustic variability.

The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

How Do Speakers of a Language with a Transparent Orthographic System Perceive the L2 Vowels of a Language with an Opaque Orthographic System? An Analysis through a Battery of Behavioral Tests

Background: The present study aims to investigate the effect of the first language (L1) orthography on the perception of the second language (L2) vowel contrasts and whether orthographic effects occur at the sublexical level. Methods: Fourteen adult Greek learners of English participated in two AXB discrimination tests: one auditory and one orthography test. In the auditory test, participants listened to triads of auditory stimuli that targeted specific English vowel contrasts embedded in nonsense words and were asked to decide if the middle vowel was the same as the first or the third vowel by clicking on the corresponding labels. The orthography test followed the same procedure as the auditory test, but instead, the two labels contained grapheme representations of the target vowel contrasts. Results: All but one vowel contrast could be more accurately discriminated in the auditory than in the orthography test. The use of nonsense words in the elicitation task eradicated the possibility of a lexical effect of orthography on auditory processing, leaving space for the interpretation of this effect on a sublexical basis, primarily prelexical and secondarily postlexical. Conclusions: L2 auditory processing is subject to L1 orthography influence. Speakers of languages with transparent orthographies such as Greek may rely on the grapheme–phoneme correspondence to decode orthographic representations of sounds coming from languages with an opaque orthographic system such as English.

Does English orthography influence bilingual Spanish readers? The effect of grapheme crosslinguistic congruency and complexity on letter detection

Phonemic correspondences for a particular grapheme are not always congruent across languages. Also, some complex graphemes can be found in some languages but not in others. The purpose of this study is to determine if the congruency and complexity of English graphemes influence letter detection in L2 learners. We further investigated whether age group (7-, 9- and 11-year-old children, and university undergraduates) determines the size of these effects. Participants completed two different letter detection tasks using the mouse-tracking paradigm. Results from Experiment 1 indicate that only younger children are slightly affected by incongruent graphemes. Results from Experiment 2 show that all readers perform worse with complex graphemes. L2 learners interiorize English phonology at early stages, being barely affected by their native Spanish language. Importantly, L2 learners decode complex graphemes similarly to native English readers. Interpretations based on the BIA-d model are discussed.

The influence of orthography in second language phonological acquisition

AbstractWe provide an exhaustive review of studies in the relatively new domain of research on the influence of orthography on second language (L2) phonological acquisition. While language teachers have long recognized the importance of written input—in addition to spoken input—on learners’ development, until this century there was very little systematic research investigating the relationship between orthography and L2 phonological acquisition. Here, we review studies of the influence of written input on L2 phonological awareness, phoneme perception, the acquisition of phonological processes and syllable structure, and the pronunciation and recognition of words. We elaborate the variables that appear to moderate written input effects: (1) whether or not a novel phonological contrast is systematically represented by the L2 writing system (systematicity); (2) whether some or all of the L2 graphemes are familiar to learners from the L1 (familiarity); (3) for familiar graphemes, whether the native language (L1) and the L2 employ the same grapheme-phoneme correspondences (congruence); and (4) the ability of learners to perceive an auditory contrast that is systematically represented in writing (perceptibility). We conclude by calling for future research on the pedagogical implications of this body of work, which has thus far received very little attention by researchers.

The Role of Phonological, Auditory Sensory and Cognitive Skills on Word Reading Acquisition: A Cross-Linguistic Study.

Despite considerable evidence regarding the influence of orthography on reading processing, the impact of orthographic depth on reading predictors remains unclear. In addition, it also remains unknown the role of the orthography in the influence of auditory temporal processing and attention skills on word reading skills. The current study investigates the word reading predictors in a group of British and Brazilian children with typical development considering phonological, auditory sensory, short-term memory, and sustained attention skills. Rhyme and Alliteration skills predicted word reading in both groups; however, the correlation in the British group was more robust. Short-term memory was also correlated with reading in both groups; however, it was a significant word reading predictor only in the British group. The auditory sensory was not directly correlated with word reading in either group; however, it was involved with Rhyme and Alliteration performance only in the British group. Those results were discussed considering the complexity of the phonological structure and opaque orthography in English when compared to Portuguese, which indicates that the less transparent the orthography, the higher the importance of factors such as phonological awareness, short-term memory, and to some extent, auditory sensory processing skills on word reading acquisition. Those results emphasize the need to consider orthography and phonological features of a particular language when developing a reading assessment and treatments.

The influence of orthography on speech production: Evidence from masked priming in word-naming and picture-naming tasks.

In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole pronunciation of their initial kanji characters (i.e., match pairs; e.g., /ka-se.ki/- /ka-rjo.ku/). When the shared initial mora was only a part of the kanji characters' readings, however, there was no facilitation (i.e., mismatch pairs; e.g., /ha.tu-a.N/- /ha.ku-bu.tu/). In the present study, we used a masked priming picture-naming task to investigate whether the previous results were relevant only when the orthography of targets is visually presented. In Experiment 1, the main findings of our word-naming task were fully replicated in a picture-naming task. In Experiments 2 and 3, the absence of facilitation for the mismatch pairs were confirmed with a new set of stimuli. On the other hand, a significant facilitation was observed for the match pairs that shared the 2 initial morae (in Experiment 4), which was again consistent with the results of our word-naming study. These results suggest that the orthographic properties constrain the phonological expression of masked priming for kanji words across 2 tasks that are likely to differ in how phonology is retrieved. Specifically, we propose that orthography of a word is activated online and constrains the phonological encoding processes in these tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Influence of Orthography on Phonemic Knowledge: An Experimental Investigation on German and Persian

This study investigated whether the phonological representation of a word is modulated by its orthographic representation in case of a mismatch between the two representations. Such a mismatch is found in Persian, where short vowels are represented phonemically but not orthographically. Persian adult literates, Persian adult illiterates, and German adult literates were presented with two auditory tasks, an AX-discrimination task and a reversal task. We assumed that if orthographic representations influence phonological representations, Persian literates should perform worse than Persian illiterates or German literates on items with short vowels in these tasks. The results of the discrimination tasks showed that Persian literates and illiterates as well as German literates were approximately equally competent in discriminating short vowels in Persian words and pseudowords. Persian literates did not well discriminate German words containing phonemes that differed only in vowel length. German literates performed relatively poorly in discriminating German homographic words that differed only in vowel length. Persian illiterates were unable to perform the reversal task in Persian. The results of the other two participant groups in the reversal task showed the predicted poorer performance of Persian literates on Persian items containing short vowels compared to items containing long vowels only. German literates did not show this effect in German. Our results suggest two distinct effects of orthography on phonemic representations: whereas the lack of orthographic representations seems to affect phonemic awareness, homography seems to affect the discriminability of phonemic representations.

Mandarin Chinese modality exclusivity norms.

Modality exclusivity norms have been developed in different languages for research on the relationship between perceptual and conceptual systems. This paper sets up the first modality exclusivity norms for Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language with semantics as its orthographically relevant level. The norms are collected through two studies based on Chinese sensory words. The experimental designs take into consideration the morpho-lexical and orthographic structures of Chinese. Study 1 provides a set of norms for Mandarin Chinese single-morpheme words in mean ratings of the extent to which a word is experienced through the five sense modalities. The degrees of modality exclusivity are also provided. The collected norms are further analyzed to examine how sub-lexical orthographic representations of sense modalities in Chinese characters affect speakers’ interpretation of the sensory words. In particular, we found higher modality exclusivity rating for the sense modality explicitly represented by a semantic radical component, as well as higher auditory dominant modality rating for characters with transparent phonetic symbol components. Study 2 presents the mean ratings and modality exclusivity of coordinate disyllabic compounds involving multiple sense modalities. These studies open new perspectives in the study of modality exclusivity. First, links between modality exclusivity and writing systems have been established which has strengthened previous accounts of the influence of orthography in the processing of visual information in reading. Second, a new set of modality exclusivity norms of compounds is proposed to show the competition of influence on modality exclusivity from different linguistic factors and potentially allow such norms to be linked to studies on synesthesia and semantic transparency.

How pinyin tone formats and character orthography influence Chinese learners’ tone acquisition

AbstractIn L2 Chinese vocabulary instruction, the most conventional method of teaching is to present the new character, its English translation, and pinyin as a pronunciation guide to the segmental and tonal information. In this study focusing on tone formats and the presence of a phonetic radical, we investigated how these two aspects could impact tone acquisition. In the experiment, L2 Chinese participants of three proficiency levels learned 24 unfamiliar words, passed a criterion test with 90 % correctness, and completed a tone perception and production task. The results showed that the learners perceived and produced tones significantly better when characters were shown with tone diacritics and when the phonetic radical was reliable. The presence of pinyin with tone number did not facilitate tone acquisition more than the condition where pinyin was unavailable. The learners’ proficiency levels, only affecting the number of learning sessions required to pass the criterion test, did not correlate with their tone performance.

The influence of orthography in the adaptation of English schwa

This study aims to test the Perceptual Uncertainty Hypothesis proposed by Daland et al. (2015). According to this hypothesis, variability in loanword...

The influence of orthography in the adaptation of English schwa

The influence of orthography in the adaptation of English schwa

How much does orthography influence the processing of reduced word forms? Evidence from novel-word learning about French schwa deletion.

This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable. In Experiment 1, the words were consistently produced without schwa or produced in a variable manner (i.e., sometimes produced with and sometimes produced without schwa). In Experiment 2, words were always produced in a consistent manner, but an orthographic exposure phase was included in which words that were produced without schwa were either spelled with or without the letter <e>. Results from naming and eye-tracking tasks suggest that both phonological variation and spelling-sound consistency influence the processing of spoken novel words. However, the influence of phonological variation outweighs the effect of spelling-sound consistency. Our findings therefore suggest that the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms is relatively small.

The relationship between the perception and production of four General British vowels by Slovene university students of English

This paper presents a study of the influence of orthography and phonemic transcription on the pronunciation of the four GB vowels /e/, /æ/, /ʌ/, and /ɜ:/ by Slovene university students of English. The paper also examines the relation between the perception and production of the four vowels in question by comparing the perception results of the same vowels from a previous study and the production results of this study. The results indicate a positive influence of phonemic transcription on the production of the examined vowels, whereas the influence of orthography on the pronunciation is confusing and leads to pronunciation errors. The results also confirm the findings of the perception study that the most difficult vowel contrast to maintain is between /e/ and /æ/. Interestingly, the perceived vocalic substitutes do not match the pronunciation substitutes for these two vowels. While the pronunciation of /e/ is excellent, its perception is still confused with /æ/.

Modeling the impact of orthographic coding on Czech–Polish and Bulgarian–Russian reading intercomprehension

Focusing on orthography as a primary linguistic interface in every reading activity, the central research question we address here is how orthographic intelligibility can be measured and predicted between closely related languages. This paper presents methods and findings of modeling orthographic intelligibility in a reading intercomprehension scenario from the information-theoretic perspective. The focus of the study is on two Slavic language pairs: Czech–Polish (West Slavic, using the Latin script) and Bulgarian–Russian (South Slavic and East Slavic, respectively, using the Cyrillic script). In this article, we present computational methods for measuring orthographic distance and orthographic asymmetry by means of the Levenshtein algorithm, conditional entropy and adaptation surprisal method that are expected to predict the influence of orthography on mutual intelligibility in reading.

The Influence of Orthography on the Production of Alphabetic, Second-Language Allophones by Speakers of a Non-alphabetic Language.

This study investigated the influence of orthographic information on the production of allophones in a second language (L2). Two proficiency levels of native Mandarin speakers learned novel Korean words with potential variants of /h/ based on auditory stimuli, and then they were provided various types of spellings for the variants, including the letters for [[Formula: see text]] and ø. Subsequently, picture-naming and spelling recall tasks were given to the Mandarin-speaking learners. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking learners, after exposure to the spellings, began to produce and lexically store the /h/ variants following the given forms of the spellings of words, which provides support for the impact of spellings in the production and lexical storage of L2 allophones. However, the effect of L2-learning experience was not shown to be strong, which suggests difficulty in the native-like attainment of the production of L2 allophones.

The Influence of the Pinyin and Zhuyin Writing Systems on the Acquisition of Mandarin Word Forms by Native English Speakers.

The role of written input in second language (L2) phonological and lexical acquisition has received increased attention in recent years. Here we investigated the influence of two factors that may moderate the influence of orthography on L2 word form learning: (i) whether the writing system is shared by the native language and the L2, and (ii) if the writing system is shared, whether the relevant grapheme-phoneme correspondences are also shared. The acquisition of Mandarin via the Pinyin and Zhuyin writing systems provides an ecologically valid opportunity to explore these factors. We first asked whether there is a difference in native English speakers' ability to learn Pinyin and Zhuyin grapheme-phoneme correspondences. In Experiment 1, native English speakers assigned to either Pinyin or Zhuyin groups were exposed to Mandarin words belonging to one of two conditions: in the “congruent” condition, the Pinyin forms are possible English spellings for the auditory words (e.g., < nai> for [nai]); in the “incongruent” condition, the Pinyin forms involve a familiar grapheme representing a novel phoneme (e.g., < xiu> for [ɕiou]). At test, participants were asked to indicate whether auditory and written forms matched; in the crucial trials, the written forms from training (e.g., < xiu>) were paired with possible English pronunciations of the Pinyin written forms (e.g., [ziou]). Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except that participants additionally saw pictures depicting word meanings during the exposure phase, and at test were asked to match auditory forms with the pictures. In both experiments the Zhuyin group outperformed the Pinyin group due to the Pinyin group's difficulty with “incongruent” items. A third experiment confirmed that the groups did not differ in their ability to perceptually distinguish the relevant Mandarin consonants (e.g., [ɕ]) from the foils (e.g., [z]), suggesting that the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 can be attributed to the effects of orthographic input. We thus conclude that despite the familiarity of Pinyin graphemes to native English speakers, the need to suppress native language grapheme-phoneme correspondences in favor of new ones can lead to less target-like knowledge of newly learned words' forms than does learning Zhuyin's entirely novel graphemes.