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 andlong 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 controlsperformed a Consonant Perception task and a Vowel Perception Task. They heard English homophonicword pairs containing a target sound spelled with one or two letters and indicated whether thetwo words contained the same sounds or not. For half of the listeners a picture was used to activate targetwords (Auditory-Visual Input group). Bilinguals in this group perceived different sounds in homophonicpairs. Experiment 2 tested whether naturalistic exposure reduces orthographic effects on speechperception by comparing learners, sequential bilinguals, and English controls (all n = 30) withAuditory-Visual Input. Orthographic form (spelling) affected consonant perception in both of the secondlanguage listener groups. Learners were less affected than bilinguals. Analyses indicated that this wasbecause of the learners’ high proficiency. It appears that ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2 make a longshortcontrast for consonants—unattested in English—and illusorily perceive it in spoken English homophonouswords