First-language-specific orthographic effects in second-language speech

Abstract

We investigated first-language (L1) orthographic effects on second-language (L2) speech production in Korean–English and Farsi–English bilinguals, as compared to English monolinguals. We used a word-reading and word-naming task to compare the production of the single grapheme (letter) (e.g, ) with the digraph (e.g., ). An acoustic analysis of 600 tokens in Praat revealed that Korean–English bilinguals exhibited significantly longer [m:] productions compared to English monolinguals, but that the Farsi–English bilinguals did not. Longer/geminate [m:] productions are attributed to orthography-induced L1 transfer. We concluded that orthography does affect L2 word-reading and phonological mental representations, even when the L1 and L2 may have different scripts. We recommend that L2 speech learning be treated as a multi-modal event.