The impact of the cognitive effects of L1 orthographic depth and
morphological complexity on L2 French morphographic processing
Orthographic depth has been shown to influence the default
orthographic processing mechanisms. However, the question of the impact of L1
orthographic depth on the processing of L2 orthography is still open. Crucially,
current studies on orthographic depth tend to focus on the processing of simple
words and do not consider other factors that interact with orthographic depth,
such as morphological complexity. Our study is a preliminary investigation of
whether the processing of L2 written inflected words shows crosslinguistic
cognitive transfer effects of L1 orthographic depth and L1 morphological
complexity. We focus on homophonic vs. heterophonic French subject-verb
agreement (arrive / arrivent [aʁiv] (‘arrives’ (3sg) / ‘arrive’
(3pl)) vs. part [paʁ] / partent [paʁt]
(‘leaves’ (3sg) / ‘leave’ (3pl)) in two groups of experienced L2 French
learners whose L1 is Spanish or Italian (both exhibiting shallow orthography and
complex morphology) vs. English (exhibiting deep orthography and simple
morphology). Results suggest that during the processing of L2 written inflected
words, L2 learners whose L1 is morphologically complex with shallow orthography
rely more on orthography-oriented morphological (sub-lexical) processing; whilst
L2 learners whose L1 is morphologically simple with deep orthography rely more
on phonology-oriented lexical processing.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Orthographic depth and transfer effects
- 2.2Orthographic depth and morphological processing
- 2.3French verb morphography (subject-verb agreement) and L2 processing
- 3.The current study
- 3.1Participants
- 3.2Sentences and target items
- 3.3Tasks
- 3.4Procedure
- 3.5Data treatment and analyses
- 4.Results
- 4.1Overall agreement performance and crosslinguistic differences
- 4.2Inflection audibility and crosslinguistic effects
- 4.3Qualitative analysis of non-canonical sentences
- 4.3.1Structure modification
- 4.3.2Verb form alteration
- 5.Discussion
- Morphographic performance in L2 French learners (statistical
analyses)
- Morphographic behavior in non-canonical sentences (qualitative
analysis)
- Morphographic performance in L1 French writers vs. L2 French learners
- 6.Conclusions and future research
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
-
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