The effect of auditory-visual information and orthographic background in L2 acquisition

Visual information from the lips and face is an integral part of speech perception. In addition, orthography can play a role in disambiguating the speech signal in foreign/second language (L2) perception and production. The current study investigates the effect of auditory and visual speech information and orthographic depth, the degree to which a language is transparent (high phoneme-grapheme correspondence), or opaque (low phoneme-grapheme correspondence) on L2 acquisition. Speakers of Turkish and Australian English (transparent and opaque orthographies, respectively) were tested for their production of legal non-words in Spanish and Irish (transparent and opaque orthographies, respectively). Transparent orthographic input (Spanish) enhanced pronunciation in L2, and orthographic reproduction. Native speaker ratings of the participants’ productions also revealed that orthographic input improves accent. Overall results confirm previous findings that visual information enhances speech perception and production, and extend previous results to show the facilitative effects of orthographic input in L2 acquisition under certain conditions