The relation between orthography and phonology from different angles: insights from psycholinguistics and second language acquisition.

Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Tyler & Burnham, 2006). However, despite the long-standing acceptance of the importance of orthography in word recognition, little research has been carried out on how orthography may exert any influence on second language acquisition. The interest in orthography has so far mainly come from two fields: the field of psycholinguistics and that of reading acquisition. In the field of psycholinguistics the focus of previous studies has often lain on the effects of spelling-to-sound inconsistencies and sound-to-spelling inconsistencies on word recognition (Pattamadilok, Morais, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2007; Ziegler & Ferrand, 1998; Ziegler, Petrova, & Ferrand, 2008). The aim is to get an insight into how exactly graphemes are mapped onto phonemes in the minds of literate people and into the extent to which there is feedback between the lexical and the phonological and orthographical components. The onset of reading has been shown to have an effect on the child’s developing phonological system (Goswami, Ziegler, & Richardson, 2005). First language acquisition studies often aim at examining to what extent learning to read promotes phonemic awareness (or syllabic awareness, in some non-alphabetic languages) or to what extent this awareness assists children in the acquisition of their language’s writing system