I'm 10 years uglier.
Most of these studies were published after 2007. Excuse my French but if people in your circles are moving away from some of these conclusions they are indeed on the bleeping bleeding edge of research:
The Impact of Orthography on L2 Phonolexical AcquisitionThe acquisition of L2 sound contrasts is notoriously difficult. ...Difficulty at both the phonetic and phonological/lexical levels...
Unfamiliarity with graphophonological representations causes difficulty in L2 phonological acquisition, at both lexical and sublexical levels of processing. This difficulty may arise from:
–
depleted attention from the auditory input–having to establish novel sound-letter correspondences
–unintuitive, arbitrary graphemic representation
Conclusion
• There is more to L2 speech processing than meets the eye.
• ...unfamiliar spelling can hinder the acquisition of a phonological contrast in a second language.
• More work is needed to fully understand the interrelationship between orthography and L2 phonological acquisition.
L’influence de l’orthographe dans l’acquisition phonologique du Français Langue Seconde (FLS)L’apprenant anglophone du FLS doit acquérir
– de nouveaux phonèmes (e.g. /u/-/y/: ‘tout’ – ‘tu’)
– de nouvelles structures syllabiques (e.g. /pn/ ‘pneu’, /ɡn/ ‘gnou’)
Pour cela, il doit se défaire de ses référents phonologiques natifs.
Résultats: Phase d’apprentissage
La présence de l’orthographe ne ralentit (ou n’accelère) pas de façon significative le temps de mémorisation de nouveaux mots étrangers.L’apprentissage oral du FLS par des anglophones débutants est souvent accompagné de la forme écrite de la langue.Cette simultanéité des données linguistiques peut ne pas être bénéfique pour les apprenants.• Implications pour l’enseignement du FLS:
–
se concentrer d’abord sur les caractéristiques phonologiques du français, avant d’introduire un support écrit,– fournir des instructions explicites sur les conventions orthographiques du français,
– être conscient que des structures phonologiques, en apparence
similaires, ne sont pas apprises de façon équivalente.
https://sites.google.com/site/liomat22/publicationsThe influence of foreign scripts on the acquisition of a second language phonological contrastFirst Published September 3,
2015 Abstract
Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on Roman-based scripts. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonological acquisition remains understudied...The results show that the degree of script unfamiliarity does not in itself seem to significantly affect the successful acquisition of this particular phonological contrast. However, the presence of certain foreign scripts in the course of phonological acquisition can yield significantly different learning outcomes in comparison to having no orthographic representation available. Specifically, the Arabic script exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonological acquisition, while the Cyrillic and Roman/Cyrillic blended scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme–phoneme correspondences activated first language (L1) phonological units.
Besides revealing, for the first time, that foreign written input can significantly hinder learners’ ability to reliably encode an L2 phonological contrast, this study also provides further evidence for the irrepressible hold of native orthographic rules on L2 phonological acquisition[/b].
http://slr.sagepub.com/content/32/2/145.abstractThe Influence of Unfamiliar Orthography on L2 Phonolexical Acquisition
http://hdl.handle.net/10150/337366Representation of second language phonology"Orthographies encode phonological information only at the level of words (chiefly, the information encoded concerns phonetic segments; in some cases, tonal information or default stress may be encoded). Of primary interest to second language (L2) learners is whether orthography can assist in clarifying L2 phonological distinctions that are particularly difficult to perceive (e.g., where one native-language phonemic category captures two L2 categories). A review of spoken-word recognition evidence suggests that orthographic information can install knowledge of such a distinction in lexical representations but that this does not affect learners’ ability to perceive the phonemic distinction in speech. Words containing the difficult phonemes become even harder for L2 listeners to recognize, because perception maps less accurately to lexical content."
LEXICAL REPRESENTATION WITHOUT PERCEPTION: HELP OR HINDRANCE FOR THE LEARNER?
In L1, the lexicon and input match: the contrasts that are phonologically represented in the lexicon are those that are perceptually distinguished in the input. However, what we see here is a mismatch between input and lexicon for listeners attempting to acquire these difficult contrasts. What implications follow from this for the learner of an L2?
As described by Escudero (2015 [this issue]), the inclusion in the lexicon of a contrast that is indistiguishable in perception has been viewed in some literature as evidence that orthographic information (the implied source of the distinction) can assist the L2 learner. On the face of it, this seems a plausible interpretation: if the phonemic distinction is lexically coded, then the phonological representations in the learner’s lexicon are more in line with those of native listeners, which is certainly desirable. In addition, distinct lexical representations may prompt listeners to attempt a distinction in speech production, making the L2 speaker (if the attempt is successful) more intelligible to native listeners; and addition of unwanted homophones to the learner’s stored vocabulary can be avoided. Of course, as pointed out above, homophones are not really a problem for any listener in any language, first or second: homophony is the normal currency of vocabularies. Thus, this “help” with homophony is at best of minor usefulness.
However, what if the lexical representation does not match the perceived input?
...a very serious hindrance arises when a distinction that cannot be perceived in the input is incorporated in the lexicon.
...attaining mastery of a confusable L2 distinction would deliver a huge gain for learners perceptually.In summary, the distinction that has been accurately incorporated in the lexicon, but crucially on the basis not of phonetic perception but of nonspeech information, has created a situation in which mismatch cannot work, and in doing so, it has exacerbated the competition problem in spoken-word recognition rather than alleviating it.
L2 learners are doing themselves no perceptual favor at all by incorporating into their lexicon (whether by using information from orthography or from any other source) a distinction that they cannot reliably perceive in the input....phonemic repertoire is not the only phonological information that L2 learners must master.
Phonotactic constraints are language-specific also (and L1 phonotactics can interfere with L2 listening even at very high levels of L2 proficiency; Weber & Cutler, 2006). Suprasegmental information such as pitch can be lexically distinctive in one of a speaker’s languages but quite irrelevant for distinguishing between words in another. The phonological shape of words differs across languages, as does lexical
prosody... While alphabetic writing systems provide reasonably good information about phonemic repertoires (especially when grapheme-to-phoneme mappings are highly consistent), the rest of the phonological information that L2 learners need to acquire is hardly available from reading at all. Give or take a few indirect implications and an occasional language that makes certain phonological structures explicit,
the natural availability of nonsegmental phonological information in orthography is unimpressive:
1. Sentence prosody: Intonation, focus, and contrastive emphasis can be in part expressed syntactically, but they are principally expressed in suprasegmental dimensions; because they are very largely determined by contextual factors, they vary widely and are essentially never coded orthographically...
2. Lexical prosody: Stress languages do not, in general, incorporate stress in writing, although exceptions may be orthographically marked where general rules account for the majority of stress placements, as in Spanish (note that even then, the number of cases counting as exceptional, and hence receiving such explicit realization, varies across varieties of the language, for example, between European and South American Spanish). L2 learners of English and other Germanic languages, or of Russian, or Arabic, or Indonesian, however, receive not even such partial indications of stress placement. In pitch accent languages such as Japanese, likewise, there is no orthographic coding of accent patterns.
3. Phonotactics: Some phonotactic constraints can be inferred from the available orthographic symbols in explicitly syllabic orthographies such as Korean, or the kana orthographies of Japanese, but in alphabetic orthographies, especially those with higher degrees of opacity, again there is no orthographic support for learning.
4. Casual speech processes: In informal speech, speakers reduce, delete, or assimilate sounds that may be explicitly articulated in more formal registers, and again, none of this is ever encoded in formal writing (though novelists occasionally use “eye dialect” to represent some aspects of casual speech, such as syllable deletion, or assimilation as in doncha for don’t you; and some processes also turn up in text messages, the driving force there, however, being space saving, not verisimilitude).
In summary, very little information about phonology is available in written text.Listeners whose L1 does not have lexical stress are known to experience great difficulty encoding and recalling stress patterns... L2 learners from such backgrounds also perform poorly on tests of stress mastery in their L2 even when they can accurately perceive an equivalent nonlinguistic contrast... Conversely, listeners whose L1 is another stress language are able to perceive and store the stress patterns of their L2, even if the L1 and L2 stress placement rules differ...
None of this suggests that L2 learners can expect much true and lasting help from recourse to orthography in their quest to master an L2 phonology. Obviously mastering the orthography of an L2 is necessary for full use of the language, and it relationships between words, appreciating morphological structure, and more...In both L1 and L2, lexical representations are abstracted from input evidence, and every aspect of such a representation that has as its source other than spoken input must be solely based on abstract knowledge.
In conclusion, using orthography or other abstract speech-external information to incorporate a distinction into lexical representations certainly works. However, the side effects of gaining the distinction solely in such a way, without perceptually attainable support, are added competition, and hence processing delay in word recognition, which can be quite inimical to learners’ progress in their L2."
http://www.mpi.nl/publications/escidoc-1868203
