Cross-Linguistic Orthographic Effects in Late Spanish/English Bilinguals

Abstract

Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic-phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g., El detective busca su banco 'The detective is looking for his bench') in order to select a target image. Stimuli included two types of trials that represent potential conflict in bilinguals: b-v trials, e.g., banco-vaso 'bench-glass', representing homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations in Spanish, and j-h trials, e.g., juego-huevo 'game-egg', representing interlingual homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations. Data were collected on accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mean proportion of target fixation. Reaction Time results indicate that Spanish-dominant speakers were slower when the competitor was present in b-v trials, though no effects were observed for English-dominant speakers. Eye-tracking results indicate a lack of competition effects in either set of trials for English-dominant speakers, but lower proportional target fixations for Spanish-dominant speakers in both sets of trials when an orthographic/phonological distractor was present. These results suggest that Spanish-dominant bilinguals may be influenced by the orthographic mappings of their less-dominant L2 English, providing new insight into the nature of the interaction between the orthography and phonology in bilingual speakers.

The influence of orthography in second language phonological acquisition

“…Dean and Valdes Kroff (2017) examined the processing of Spanish words by 18 English-dominant English-Spanish bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals using a visual world paradigm and eye tracking. Participants heard Spanish words in a neutral sentence context (e.g., El detective busca su __ ‘The detective is looking for his __’) and were asked to click on a picture matching the target word.…”

“…In the first lesson plan, they suggest introducing the pronunciation of Spanish words before exposing learners to the words’ written forms so as to avoid potential interference from incongruent grapheme-phoneme correspondences. They suggest that such an approach could be used in the cases of the most problematic graphemes (see, e.g., Dean & Valdes Kroff, 2017 for examples). In the second lesson plan, they address the challenge of Spanish rhotics, in particular the sometimes-opaque mappings of Spanish <r> and <rr> to the alveolar trill /r/ and the flap /ɾ/.…”

Phonological Distinctive Features of the Ribun Dayak Language: The Phonemes and Word Syllables

“…As a language fact, the phoneme /r/ in morpheme /ribun/ is pronounced [h], making it [hibun], similar to the case of morpheme /biru/ 'blue' that is aspirated [bihu] in the Seberuang Dayak language found in Kapuas Hulu district, the eastern part of West Kalimantan. This language fact is arbitrary since it is also found, for instance, in Spanish for the phoneme /j/ that is aspirated [h] (Dean & Kroff, 2017). Although the language fact is excluded, it is essential to look at it at a glance for valid lexis used in this research.…”

Orthography affects L1 and L2 speech perception but not production in early bilinguals

“…More recently, researchers have started investigating the complex effects of orthography on L2 learning. A number of studies have not found orthographic effects on L2 speech processing (Dean & Valdés Kroff, 2017;Simon, Chambless & Alves, 2010). Others have provided evidence that exposure to orthography in addition to oral input enhances lexical learning, increasing phonemic accuracy in both perception and production (Bürki, Welby, Clément & Spinelli, 2019;Erdener & Burnham, 2005;Escudero, Hayes-Harb & Mitterer, 2008).…”