Does English orthography influence bilingual Spanish readers? The effect of grapheme crosslinguistic congruency and complexity on letter detection

• Published in: Cognitive development Vol. 59; p. 101074
• Main Authors: Hevia-Tuero, Carmen, Incera, Sara, Suárez-Coalla, Paz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.07.2021
• Subjects: Bilingual; Complexity; Congruency; Grapheme; Mouse tracking; Mouse tracking; Grapheme; Congruency; Complexity; Bilingual
• ISSN: 0885-2014; 1879-226X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2021.101074

•L2 learners decode complex graphemes as native readers do.•L2 learners interiorize English phonology early in development.•Native language orthography has influence on L2 orthographic learning.•Just before middle-childhood is a key stage for biliteracy acquisition. Phonemic correspondences for a particular grapheme are not always congruent across languages. Also, some complex graphemes can be found in some languages but not in others. The purpose of this study is to determine if the congruency and complexity of English graphemes influence letter detection in L2 learners. We further investigated whether age group (7-, 9- and 11-year-old children, and university undergraduates) determines the size of these effects. Participants completed two different letter detection tasks using the mouse-tracking paradigm. Results from Experiment 1 indicate that only younger children are slightly affected by incongruent graphemes. Results from Experiment 2 show that all readers perform worse with complex graphemes. L2 learners interiorize English phonology at early stages, being barely affected by their native Spanish language. Importantly, L2 learners decode complex graphemes similarly to native English readers. Interpretations based on the BIA-d model are discussed.