Grapheme coding in L2: How do L2 learners process new graphemes?

The use and nature of grapheme coding during sub-lexical processing and lexical access

“…Furthermore, our finding of this effect in all experimental conditions, including Experiments 1b and 1c that were designed to minimize the influence of phonology, supports the hypothesis of an early orthographic mechanism, possibly during grapheme parsing (Perry et al, 2007). This is in line with two previous letter detection studies using a short presentation of the target word (33 ms; Commissaire et al, 2014;Rey et al, 2000) and extends it to a dual-task context in which participants were asked to repeat simultaneously a nonsense phonological sequence. Complex graphemes are coded as units when accessing their phonological representations, as demonstrated by the grapheme complexity effects observed in naming tasks, but even earlier, as orthographic units or chunks per se (see similar conclusions by Marinus & de Jong, 2010).…”

“…After some reading experience, one could imagine that these units become sub-lexical orthographic units, relatively independent of phonological representations. These units would be activated within the sub-lexical route to reading as similar results are generally observed whether the letter to detect appears in a word or a nonword (Commissaire et al, 2014). These data are in line with reading models that incorporate a two-stage grapheme processing level during sub-lexical route to reading, such as BIAM (Diependaele et al, 2010) and CDP/+ (Perry et al, 2010).…”

“…Although we showed in Experiment 1 that these units could be activated under little or no phonological activation, and thus be processed as orthographic units per se, the letter detection task that was used does not precisely assess lexical access as the response required could be provided without accessing the lexical representation of the word. In fact, previous studies have reported comparable patterns with words and pseudowords (Commissaire et al, 2014). Lupker and colleagues recently questioned the role of grapheme units in lexical access using the masked primed lexical decision task in a set of four experiments.…”

“…According to this "orthographic" hypothesis, grapheme parsing, as shown by grapheme complexity effects, could arise partly independently of phonological activation, within the early steps of orthographic coding. While the hypothesis of a grapheme parsing stage has been supported by some studies (Marinus & de Jong, 2010;Schmalz et al, 2016), the extent to which grapheme complexity effects found in the letter detection task could also partly reflect phonological mechanisms that are known to be involved in this task (Commissaire et al, 2014;Rey et al, 2000;Experiment 2;Spinelli, Kandel, Guerassimovitch, & Ferrand, 2012) remains unclear; furthermore, it is not known whether these effects are found when minimizing any phonological influence. Indeed, according to a "phonological" interpretation of grapheme complexity effects, one could also hypothesize that these effects emerge during grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (see recent naming study discussing this issue by Schmalz et al, 2016).…”

HelexKids: A word frequency database for Greek and Cypriot primary school children

“…As well as being vital for work on typical development, both within (e.g., Pattamadilok, Morais, De Vylder, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2009; Ziegler et al., 2014) and across (e.g., Duncan, Casalis, & Colé, 2009; Duncan et al., 2013) different native languages, the control over the lexical characteristics of stimuli that children’s databases offer also strengthens research on second language learning (e.g., Commissaire, Duncan, & Casalis, 2014) and on developmental disorders such as dyslexia (e.g., Quémart & Casalis, 2015; Ziegler & Muneaux, 2007). …”