L2 sound perception: Does orthography matter?

In recent years, there has been growing interest in how L2 learners’ perceptual abilities relate to their lexical representation of foreign words, and in how orthography may play a role in this. In this study we address both questions using two perception experiments that were concerned with the discrimination and representation of German long vowels by Polish learners of L2 German and a native speaker control group. While the first experiment tested phonetic discrimination abilities using nonsense words, the second experiment was a judgement task that was designed to tap into the participants’ lexical representations. Half of the test items in the judgement task were real words containing vowels that were explicitly marked for length in their orthography, while the remaining items were not explicitly marked. The findings of the two experiments are dissociated; interestingly, orthography did not seem to be the driving factor.