The role of orthography in second-language spoken word production: Evidence from Tibetan Chinese bilinguals

Abstract

Evidence suggests that spoken language production involves involuntary access to orthographic representations, both in languages with alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. An unexplored question is whether the role of orthography varies as a function of the language being native or non-native to the individual. Native (L1) and non-native (L2) languages differ in important aspects, that is, lexical representations in L2 might be less well established, but acquired at least partly via reading, and these unique features of non-native languages may contribute to a fundamental difference in how spelling and sound interact in production. We investigated an orthographic impact on spoken production with Tibetan Chinese bilinguals who named coloured line drawings of objects with Chinese adjective–noun phrases. Colour and object names were orthographically related or unrelated. Even though none of the participants were aware of the orthographic manipulation, orthographic overlap generated a facilitatory effect. In conjunction with earlier findings from native speakers on the identical task, we conclude that orthographic information is activated in spoken word production regardless of whether the response language is native or non-native.

Phonological network fluency identifies phonological restructuring through mental search

“…Next, due to the task design, we were unable to account for why participants of greater Num_Chinese experienced greater lexical competition. For instance it is possible that participants consciously or unconsciously used knowledge of radicals during search 63,64 . Given the constraints of the task, and the low phonological consistency of radicals, this search criteria would likely lead to spurious neighbors and thus the effect of producing neither high successive neighbors nor immediate neighbors.…”

“…Naming latencies of colored line drawings were facilitated for words that shared radicals (components of Chinese characters) 64 despite characters never being exposed to the participants during the task. Using the same paradigm, Tibetan L2 speakers of Mandarin showed that interactivity of Chinese orthography and phonological information during speech production occurs for L2 speakers as well 63 .…”

Orthographic effects in speech production: A psycholinguistic study with adult Brazilian-Portuguese English bilinguals / Efeitos ortográficos na produção da fala: um estudo psicolinguístico com adultos bilíngues falantes de Português Brasileiro e Inglês

“…When it comes to acquiring an additional language later in life, it has been well documented that many learning hurdles arise from the fine-grained similarities and dissimilarities between different sound systems in contact that impinge on the perception of non-native sounds, leading to miscategorization and difficulties in production (ESCUDERO, 2011;SMILJANIC, 2011). More recently, orthography also started to be modeled as part of the knowledge that underlies L2 speech acquisition and processing (BASSETTI; ATKINSON, 2015;ESCUDERO, 2011;DAMIAN, 2019b;JÄRVIKIVI, 2013;VEIVO et al, 2018).…”