How Awareness of Orthographic Transparency Benefits the Lexical Encoding of Second Language Vowels

Abstract

We investigated the influence of orthographic transparency, and learners’ awareness of it, on the second language (L2) phonolexical encoding of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid‐vowel contrasts. In BP, accent marks indicate vowel quality (mid‐closed vs. mid‐open), resulting in transparent grapheme–phoneme correspondences, whereas words without accents are opaque. To test whether transparency benefits phonolexical encoding of vowel quality, 20 native speakers of American English learning BP completed a perceptual categorization, a lexical decision, and an orthographic knowledge task. Learners perceived the difference between the vowel quality contrasts but confused the vowels lexically. The learner group more easily rejected nonwords created from real words carrying accent marks than nonwords based on words without accents. However, when separating learners into low‐ and high‐awareness groups, the effect remained only for the high‐awareness group. The results suggest that orthographic transparency can result in more precise phonolexical encoding, but only for those who are orthographically aware.