Sunu: Dr. Sinem Sonsaat
TED University
Faculty of Education
"The effect of orthography on bilingual learners’ pronunciation"
by
Dr. Sinem SONSAAT
Date: January 7, 2019, Monday
Time: 15:30 - 16:00
Place: F123
Research shows that bilinguals’ language activation is non-selective, that is, they may automatically and unintentionally activate lexical and phonological structures of one language while speaking the other (Mishra & Singh, 2013). A bilingual’s two languages’ forms being similar to each other, as in the English word ‘number’ and the German word ‘nummer’, is one of the reasons for mutual activation of both languages (Marian & Spivey, 2003). This type of similarity usually occurs with cognates and near cognates. While cognates trigger lexical access, near cognates are shown to trigger lexical access but impede language identification, especially in relation to L1 and L2 word frequency (Dijkstra et al., 2010).
Lexical access and language identification tasks draw on perceptions of dominant and non-dominant languages. Another effect of cross-language similarity can be seen in the pronunciation of the two languages. In shifting from one language to another, small differences in pronunciation may show the influence of one language on the other. If this kind of influence is possible in speech, it is even more likely in negotiating the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of different orthographies. This is especially so when the orthographic codes between the two languages do not represent the same sound patterns.
This study looked at the ways that 2nd-year English-speaking learners of German pronounced German words in three different conditions: Reading aloud, picture naming, and delayed repetition. Their performance was examined with orthographically identical cognates (Gold- gold), near cognates (Silber- silver), and non-cognates (Zimmer-room).
The results showed that there was a main effect of orthography on pronunciation performance, indicating that regardless of the cognate status of the words there was a significant difference in pronunciation performance across the three tasks. There was no main effect of cognate status on pronunciation performance, indicating that cognate status by itself did not significantly affect pronunciation performance. However, there was a significant interaction effect between orthography and the cognate status of the word, F(4, 116) = 6.78, p < .001, indicating that orthography had a different effect on pronunciation accuracy depending on the cognate status of the word.
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