Effects Of Orthography On Second Language Phonology

This is the first book devoted to the effects of orthographic forms (spellings) on second language phonology. Written by one of the pioneer researchers in the field, the book provides an authoritative overview of the effects of spellings on the perception, production, awareness, learning and teaching of sounds and spoken words in a second language. Using the findings and implications from a large-scale research project at its centre, the book reveals that English consonants spelled with double letters lead Italian learners and users of English as a second language to perceive, produce, classify, and learn English consonants as geminates (long consonants). Presenting a narrative of a second language research project, and discussing its implications, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of orthography, phonology, and speech and language perception. Language teaching practitioners will also find the book useful.

"This is the first book devoted to the effects of orthographic forms (spellings) on second language phonology. Written by one of the pioneer researchers in the field, the book provides an authoritative overview of the effects of spellings on the perception, production, awareness, learning and teaching of sounds and spoken words in a second language. Using the findings and implications from a large-scale research project at its centre, the book reveals that English consonants spelled with double letters lead Italian learners and users of English as a second language to perceive, produce, classify, and learn English consonants as geminates (long consonants). Presenting a narrative of a second language research project, and discussing its implications, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of orthography, phonology, and speech and language perception. Language teaching practitioners will also find the book useful"--

Collected here are eleven papers devoted to various aspects of the orthography/phonology interface. Topics include spelling-to-sound correspondence for English, French, and Russian, the design of a generative phonology for orthography data-base access, the linguistic sign and orthographic and phonological error, the analysis of Greenlandic school children’s spelling errors, the orthographic representation of phonemic nasalization and its implications for prosodic theory, the psycholinguistics of phonological recoding in reading, orthography as a variable in psycholinguistic experiments, spelling and dialect, orthography and the typology of phonological rules, and orthography and historical phonology.

This book brings together the findings of current studies on the second language (L2) acquisition of Turkish, an Altaic language with more than 140 million native speakers around the world. There is now a growing interest in learning and teaching Turkish as an L2, both in and outside Turkey. Coordinated efforts to produce theoretical and empirical work on the acquisition and teaching of L2 Turkish are therefore an urgent need. The compilation in this volume offers eleven L2 studies that explore the representation and/or processing of various linguistic properties in different domains of grammar (phonology, morpho-syntax, pragmatics) and their interfaces. All studies involve adult L2 Turkish learners with various first-language backgrounds at different proficiency levels. With extensive discussions on theoretical and pedagogical issues, this title will appeal to an international readership that includes L2 Turkish researchers, materials designers, and teachers.

A conversation between two people can only take place if the words intended by each speaker are successfully recognized. Spoken word recognition is at the heart of language comprehension. This automatic and smooth process remains a challenge for models of spoken word recognition. Both the process of mapping the speech signal onto stored representations for words, and the format of the representation themselves are subject to debate. So far, existing research on the nature of spoken word representations has focused mainly on native speakers. The picture becomes even more complex when looking at spoken word recognition in a second language. Given that most of the world’s speakers know and use more than one language, it is crucial to reach a more precise understanding of how bilingual and multilingual individuals encode spoken words in the mental lexicon, and why spoken word recognition is more difficult in a second language than in the native language. Current models of native spoken word recognition operate under two assumptions: (i) that listeners’ perception of the incoming speech signal is optimal; and (ii) that listeners’ lexical representations are accurate. As a result, lexical representations are easily activated, and intended words are successfully recognized. However, these assumptions are compromised when applied to a later-learned second language. For a variety of reasons (e.g., phonetic/phonological, orthographic), second language users may not perceive the speech signal optimally, and they may still be refining the motor routines needed for articulation. Accordingly, their lexical representations may differ from those of native speakers, which may in turn inhibit their selection of the intended word forms. Second language users also have to solve a larger selection challenge—having words in more than one language to choose from. Thus, for second language users, the links between perception, lexical representations, orthography, and production are all but clear. Even for simultaneous bilinguals, important questions remain about the specificity and interdependence of their lexical representations and the factors influencing cross-language word activation. This Frontiers Research Topic seeks to further our understanding of the factors that determine how multilinguals recognize and encode spoken words in the mental lexicon, with a focus on the mapping between the input and lexical representations, and on the quality of lexical representations.

In the field of second language (L2) acquisition, the number of studies focusing on L2 pronunciation instruction and perceptual/production training has increased as new classroom methodologies have been proposed and new goals for L2 pronunciation have been set. This book brings together different approaches to L2 pronunciation research in the classroom or in the language laboratory. 13 chapters, written by well-known researchers focusing on a variety of first and target languages, are divided into four parts: Pronunciation development and intelligibility: implications for teaching and training studies; L2 pronunciation teaching; L2 pronunciation training: implications for the classroom; and Pronunciation in the laboratory: High Variability Phonetic Training. Intended for researchers in the fields of second language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, speech therapies, speech technology, as well as second language teaching, this book not only summarizes the current research questions on L2 pronunciation teaching and training, but also predicts future scenarios for both researchers and practitioners in the field.

The Research Topic aims to highlight research on the processing of words, sentences and discourses across languages. Articles representing processing in a wide variety of human languages will be featured. Efforts will be made to have articles, representing as many language families as possible. The methodology used to investigate language processing is open. Manuscripts may report studies involving monolinguals or individuals knowing more than one language. Research addressing the extent to which all human languages are processed similarly are welcomed as are studies investigating the extent to which the different types of linguistic knowledge are stored differently in memory.