Orthographic forms affect speech perception in a second language: Consonant and vowel length in L2 English.

ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2 produce the same English sound as longer if spelled with two than with one letter, following Italian grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. Do Italian listeners perceive short and long sounds in English homophonic word pairs that are spelled with a single letter or a digraph (finish-Finnish; morning-mourning)? In Experiment 1, 50 ItalianL1-EnglishL2 bilinguals and 50 English controls performed a Consonant Perception task and a Vowel Perception Task. They heard English homophonic word pairs containing a target sound spelled with one or two letters and indicated whether the two words contained the same sounds or not.

Orthography-Induced Length Contrasts in the Second Language Phonological Systems of L2 Speakers of English: Evidence from Minimal Pairs.

Research shows that the orthographic forms ("spellings") of second language (L2) words affect speech production in L2 speakers. This study investigated whether English orthographic forms lead L2 speakers to produce English homophonic word pairs as phonological minimal pairs. Targets were 33 orthographic minimal pairs, that is to say homophonic words that would be pronounced as phonological minimal pairs if orthography affects pronunciation.

The linguistic transparency of first language calendar terms affects calendar calculations in a second language.

Calendar calculations - e.g., calculating the nth month after a certain month - are an important component of temporal cognition, and can vary cross-linguistically.

Orthography affects second language speech: Double letters and geminate production in English.

Second languages (L2s) are often learned through spoken and written input, and L2 orthographic forms (spellings) can lead to non-native-like pronunciation. The present study investigated whether orthography can lead experienced learners of English to make a phonological contrast in their speech production that does not exist in English. Double consonants represent geminate (long) consonants in Italian but not in English.