Orthography affects L1 and L2 speech perception but not production in early bilinguals
Date
2022Author
Stoehr, Antje
Martin, Clara D.
Metadata
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Stoehr A, Martin CD (2022). Orthography affects L1 and L2 speech perception but not production in early bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 25, 108–120. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1366728921000523
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
Abstract
Orthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and
written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-phoneme
correspondences influence bilingual speech perception and production, even when both languages
have been acquired in early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque and
Basque–Spanish early bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque
pseudowords created by replacing Basque /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take
the same orthographic form, <z>. Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks in Basque
and Spanish to test whether speech sounds with the same orthographic form were produced
similarly in the two languages. Results for both groups showed orthography had strong effects
on speech perception but no effects on speech production. Taken together, these findings suggest
that orthography plays a crucial role in the speech system of early bilinguals but does not
automatically lead to non-native production.