Spoken Words Activate Cross-Linguistic Orthographic Competitors in the Absence of Phonological Overlap

Spoken Words Activate Cross-Linguistic Orthographic Competitors in the Absence of Phonological Overlap James Bartolotti (j-bartolotti@u.northwestern.edu) Natalia L. Daniel (nataliadaniel2012@u.northwestern.edu) Viorica Marian (v-marian@northwestern.edu) Northwestern University Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 USA Abstract Related languages, like English and Spanish, often have sim- ilar orthographies but use the same letters to represent differ- ent sounds. Learning a second language frequently involves learning additional letter-sound mappings that mismatch those in the native language. In the current study, we investigated whether L2 spoken words activate L2 orthography despite con- flict with L1 orthography-to-phonology mappings. Partici- pants first learned an artificial language with letter-sound map- pings that mismatched English (e.g., the letter ‘G’ represented the sound /h/, and the word /gufO/ was spelled ‘hane’). Next, fixations of L1 crosslinguistic orthographic competitors (e.g., ‘cane’) in response to auditory L2 input (e.g., /gufO/) were assessed using the visual world paradigm. Results showed that participants fixated L1 competitors that overlapped with L2 targets orthographically (but not phonologically) more than unrelated fillers. We conclude that second language learners can rapidly acquire novel letter-sound mappings, and words based on these mappings are integrated into the existing lex- icon where they can activate orthographic competitors in the native language. Keywords: Language processing; Language learning; Cross- linguistic competition Introduction Spoken language processing involves decoding an incoming auditory signal to access words in the mental lexicon. It’s not obvious that this process should be affected by ortho- graphic knowledge, because written language is a relatively recent invention, and is learned years after spoken language. Yet, there is evidence that orthography, once acquired, influ- ences performance on phonological tasks (Jakimik, Cole, & Rudnicky, 1985; Johnston, McKague, & Pratt, 2004; Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010), suggesting tight interconnectivity be- tween orthography and phonology. This interconnectivity may be a source of difficulty during second language acquisi- tion, because the same letters can represent different sounds across languages. For example, the letter ‘W’ maps onto the phoneme /w/ in English, but /v/ in German (one is a labio- velar approximant, while the other is a voiced labio-dental fricative, which differs on both voicing, place, and manner of articulation). Second language learners thus need to learn and use these novel letter-sound correspondences in the ap- propriate language context, despite years of experience with a different set of mappings in their native language. Orthographic knowledge can help or hinder phonological processing, depending on the context. Literate adults per- form better than illiterate adults on metaphonological tasks such as adding or deleting sounds at the beginning of non- words (Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979), because literate adults can use their orthographic representations as a mental aid. On the other hand, orthography can also dis- tort phonological perception. French speakers are more likely to misperceive the phoneme /p/ as a /b/ in spoken words when the sound is represented by the letter ‘B’, as in the French word ‘absurd,’ pronounced /apsyrd/ (Hall´e, Ch´ereau, & Segui, 2000). Furthermore, orthography can affect online processing of speech. Orthographically-related primes im- prove auditory lexical decision times (Jakimik et al., 1985), but written words can act as competitors during auditory vi- sual world search tasks (Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010). Based on timecourse analyses from research on event-related po- tentials (ERPs), these orthographic effects occur early in the speech signal and are time-locked to the source of ortho- graphic effects in the word, suggesting that orthography is activated online during speech processing, and not strictly as a postlexical decision process (Perre & Ziegler, 2008). The link between orthography and phonology extends to novel words as well. In a recent study (Johnston et al., 2004), monolingual English speakers were taught a series of novel words but only learned the words’ phonological forms, and were never presented with orthography. During a sub- sequent masked priming task, orthographic versions of the trained words showed a significant priming effect, compared to the absence of any effect for completely novel written non- words. This finding suggests that learners automatically gen- erate orthographic forms for novel auditory words, based on the phonotactics of their native language. When these gener- ated forms are accurate, they can accelerate vocabulary learn- ing and improve reading of previously learned auditory words (McKague, Pratt, & Johnston, 2001). During second language learning, though, they are more likely to be inaccurate and impair learning. For example, an English-speaking learner of German may hear the auditory German word /vEk/ (spelled ‘weg’) and create an incorrect orthographic representation ‘veck’ based on their knowledge of English. This incorrect representation may then impair learning to read and write in German, as the learner’s internal representations must be in- hibited and relearned. Previous work indicates that English speakers are able to learn words and letter-sound mappings in artificial languages with training, even when they include