title: The influence of orthography on L1 and L2 spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese learners of German
title: Der Einfluss der Orthographie auf das Erkennen gesprochener Wörter im L1- und L2: Evidenz von chinesischen Deutschlernern
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Gan, Lu
Publisher: name: Philipps-Universität Marburg
Year: 2023
Subjects: Recognition
Orthographie
Language, Linguistics
Sprachwissenschaft, Linguistik
Alphabetische Srift
Logographische Schrift
L2-Lernen

description: Numerous studies have already shown that not only does phonology have an influence on visual word recognition, but conversely, orthographic influences on spoken word recognition are also clearly evident in different languages. However, its impact on L2 auditory word processing, particularly for learners with a non-alphabetic L1 background like Chinese, has not yet been investigated. Unlike German, which features a shallow alphabetic orthography with consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences, Chinese is a logographic language with a deep orthography and arbitrary mappings between written characters and phonological form. 
The present studies aim to examine what role orthography plays in L1 and L2 spoken word recognition and how language proficiency in L2 influences the processing of auditory words, particularly when the listeners are Chinese learners of German. To explore this issue, in experiments 1 and 2, two groups of Chinese participants with intermediate and high German language proficiency and a German native group were recruited to perform tasks on implicit processing of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word retrieval. I used prime-target pairs with varying degrees of orthographic and phonological overlap between prime and target in a semantic judgment task on the prime-target pairs. The results showed that primes in the orthographic-overlap condition significantly facilitated the spoken word recognition of the target in highly proficient Chinese learners of German, but only moderately in the group with intermediate language proficiency and in the German native group. The result supported that whether the orthographic form influences spoken word recognition is limited by the orthographic depth, and to what extent the orthographic information can be activated during L2 spoken word recognition is up to the L2 proficiency of listeners. 
In addition, previous research has demonstrated that long stays abroad in an L2- L2-dominant environment can influence language knowledge of L1. This implies that long-term residence in an L2 language environment can also have an impact on orthography processing in L1, especially when orthography plays a crucial role in L1, as is the case with Chinese. Hence, this study applied the idea of the residence binding factor to the Chinese auditory task to explore how orthographic similarities affect spoken word recognition when participants live in the L1- or L2-spoken environment respectively. Therefore, in experiments 3 and 4, I compared the orthographic effect in L1 spoken word recognition of Chinese–German bilinguals living in Germany with another group of Chinese monolinguals living in China. Like experiments 1 and 2, their task was to also judge the semantic relatedness of prime and target pairs, this time composed of words from their L1 Chinese with prime-target pairs that were orthographically related, phonologically related, or unrelated. The results showed that the processing of Chinese spoken word pairs with orthographic overlap took longer reaction times than unrelated word pairs and that the Chinese–German bilingual group presented a weaker orthographic and stronger phonological effect than the Chinese monolingual group. This finding suggested that the long immersion in an alphabetic L2-spoken environment might reduce the orthographic effect during Chinese spoken word recognition. 
It is generally emphasized in my studies that the unique characteristics of each language should be taken into account when investigating orthographic effects during auditory processing. The role of orthographic information in L1 spoken word recognition is language-dependent and in L2 spoken word recognition is proficiency-dependent.