Effects of beliefs about first language orthography on second language vowel perception

Abstract

Recent research has identified that L1 orthography can affect perception of vowels in a second language (e.g., Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010). The present study investigates the effect that participants' beliefs about orthography have on their ability to perceive vowels in a second language. English- and Polish-speaking learners of Swedish have to encounter some new vowel sounds and also the characters that are used to represent them, e.g., å, ä, and ö. New survey data of native speakers of English, Polish, and Swedish confirm that L1 English speakers see these characters like these as familiar letters with diacritics, while L1 Swedish and L1 Polish speakers tend to see these types of characters as different characters of the alphabet. These differing beliefs about orthography may cause English speakers to confuse the vowels represented in Swedish by the characters å, ä and ö with vowels represented by the characters a, a, and o, respectively, while Polish speakers would not be similarly affected. Results of a Swedish vowel perception study conducted with native speakers of English and Polish after exposure to Swedish words containing these characters will be presented. These results contribute to increasing knowledge about the relationship between L1 orthography and L2 phonology.