The Influence of Literacy on Speech. The Orthographic Consistency Effect in Auditory Language Perception and Language Production

136 p.The present thesis presents a series of experiments that explore of the Orthographic Consistency Effect (OCE) in auditory language perception and production. The OCE is a psycholinguistic effect that shows a facilitation in processing words with sounds that can be spelled in only one way (e.g., /t/ in French or Spanish) in comparison to words with sounds that can be spelled in multiple ways (e.g., /k/ in French or Spanish). The OCE can be considered as a by-product of literacy since it is displayed by people who know how to read and write. In Experiment 1, the OCE in auditory language perception in L1-French and L1-Spanish adults was investigated by means of an auditory lexical decision task (LDT). Experiment 2 investigated the OCE in Spanish seven-year-olds, who are at an early stage of reading acquisition, in auditory language perception using the same paradigm as in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 investigated the time course and the brain correlates of the OCE in auditory language perception. L1-Spanish adults were tested in an auditory LDT and a passive listening task. Experiment 4 explored the OCE in language production of French and Spanish adults by means of reading aloud and picture naming tasks. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 but with Spanish seven-year-olds. Overall, this work showed that literacy can strategically influence language perception and production.The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from ”la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434). The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/IN18/11660068. This project has also received funding from the European Union´s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 713673. The research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 819093)

Mental Representation of Word Family Structure: The Case of German Infinitives, Conversion Nouns and Other Morphologically Related Forms

Published: 27 July 2022This study investigates how two non-finite forms, infinitives and conversion nouns, are represented in the mind of L1 and L2 speakers and what is their relationship to other members of the corresponding word family. German native speakers and proficient German learners with Czech as L1 participated in four overt priming experiments involving a grammatical judgement task. We investigated the relationship between infinitives (Experiment 1) and conversion nouns (Experiment 2) and formally identical verbal or noun forms. We further focussed on the relationship between conversion nouns and regular nominal derivation forms with two derivational suffixes: -er and -ung (Experiments 3 and 4). Our results show that the two non-finite forms differ in their relations to other members of a word family and do not constitute a special class of non-finites as suggested in previous literature. While German infinitives seem to be closer related to finite verbal forms, conversion nouns behave in the same way as other regular nominal derivatives within the same word family. As for the German L1 and L2 contrast, no significant difference in the mental representation of the examined forms was found. This finding suggests that with respect to the explored phenomena, proficient learners rely on the same linguistic organisation as L1 speakers.This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation; grant number BO 3615/6-2 to DB) and by Universität Leipzig within the program of Open Access Publishing