Orthography and the mental lexicon: the effects of English silent letters on French learners
Abstract
Previous L2 research has shown that direct exposure to orthographic input increases orthographic effects in L2 speech. In our previous work, we demonstrated that French learners of English produce intrusive consonants in correspondence of silent letters when directly exposed to orthographic input. The present study investigates whether this persists when orthography is not provided. 91 French undergraduate students specialising in English and enrolled in various French universities performed a picture naming task and an AB audio preference task in which a phoneme had been added to each stimulus reflecting grapheme-phoneme correspondence (e.g., *[ˈsaelmən] for salmon). Results clearly confirm the strong effects of spelling on L2 pronunciation and phonological representations, therefore disclosing that: (i) orthographic input modulates L2 phonological knowledge and (ii) that orthography is directly activated when producing and listening to speech in a second language.
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