The effects of novel orthographic input and phonetic instruction in second language phonological acquisition

Research has demonstrated that exposure to orthographic input can heavily influence a person's phonological representation of a word, with the potential to even be more influential than auditory input when both are available. Previous research has investigated the helpfulness of different types of orthographic input for subjects learning a novel phonemic contrast, and some research has suggested that explicit phonetic training might also have a facilitating effect. The present experiment investigated the influence of novel orthographic elements in the input along with explicit phonetic instruction. Four groups of subjects were taught pairs of Arabic nonwords differing by the velar-uvular contrast /k/-/q/ in four different training conditions. These groups differed in the type of orthographic form used to represent the uvular /q/ (either a diacritic or a completely novel grapheme) and the amount of specific instruction provided in relation to this phonological contrast. Subjects taught using the novel grapheme outperformed those in the diacritic condition at test, while more explicit instruction only facilitated the learning for those in the diacritic condition. These findings suggest that a novel grapheme is more helpful to learners in forming phonemic lexical representations containing a novel contrast than a diacritic mark, but that the disadvantage of the diacritic can be moderated by explicit instruction.