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. For half of the listeners a picture was used to activate target words (Auditory-Visual Input group). Bilinguals in this group perceived different sounds in homophonic pairs. Experiment 2 tested whether naturalistic exposure reduces orthographic effects on speech perception by comparing learners, sequential bilinguals, and English controls (all n = 30) with Auditory-Visual Input. Orthographic form (spelling) affected consonant perception in both of the second language listener groups. Learners were less affected than bilinguals. Analyses indicated that this was because of the learners' high proficiency. It appears that ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2 make a long-short contrast for consonants-unattested in English-and illusorily perceive it in spoken English homophonous words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Gemination in Northern versus Central and Southern Varieties of Italian: A Corpus-based Investigation.

It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In particular, northern speakers are sometimes said to degeminate, or to produce shorter geminates than central and southern speakers. However, experimental data proving such claims is largely missing. In this article, we perform an analysis of the CLIPS corpus with the aim of comparing gemination for northern versus central and southern speakers of Italian. The analysis of different data types (target words in isolated position, read sentences, dialogues, local radio and TV broadcasts) revealed that: (a) geminate consonants are produced by all speakers, incl. northern speakers; (b) differences in the magnitude of consonant lengthening are small (< 19 ms) and reach significance only for some data types; (c) the shortening of vowels preceding geminate consonants is mainly restricted to isolated target words in nuclear position, with no significant differences between northern and central/southern speakers. We argue that regional differences in Italian gemination have been overestimated and overemphasized in the literature. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are not as sizeable as previously thought, probably because of the progressive standardization of the language.

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. Word pairs contained the same target sound spelled with one letter or two, such as the /n/ in finish and Finnish (both /'fɪnɪʃ/ in Standard British English). To test for effects of length and type of L2 exposure, we compared Italian instructed learners of English, Italian-English late bilinguals with lengthy naturalistic exposure, and English natives. A reading-aloud task revealed that Italian speakers of EnglishL2 produce two English homophonic words as a minimal pair distinguished by different consonant or vowel length, for instance producing the target /'fɪnɪʃ/ with a short [n] or a long [nː] to reflect the number of consonant letters in the spelling of the words finish and Finnish. Similar effects were found on the pronunciation of vowels, for instance in the orthographic pair scene-seen (both /siːn/). Naturalistic exposure did not reduce orthographic effects, as effects were found both in learners and in late bilinguals living in an English-speaking environment. It appears that the orthographic form of L2 words can result in the establishment of a phonological contrast that does not exist in the target language. Results have implications for models of L2 phonological development.