The impact of L2 oral language usage on word recognition by Portuguese and English late bilinguals

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that L2 usage modulates Brazilian Portuguese and English bilinguals’ recognition of written English words that were first presented orally. The target word pairs are distinguished by the nasal consonants /m/ and /n/ at the end of a syllable (eg: them /ðem/; then /ðen/). Although the Roman alphabet letters that usually represent these nasal consonants occur in similar syllable graphotactic positions in both languages, there is a phonotactic contrast between English and Portuguese syllabic organization that has an impact on the phonic value attributed to graphemes shared by the spelling rules of both languages. The investigation was based on the Visual-World Paradigm (TANENHAUS et al., 1995; TANENHAUS; SPIVEY-KNOWLTON, 1996) and its eye-tracking related experiments. Oral language usage was operationalized as participants’ self-declared behaviors collected through items of questionnaire adapted from Valadares (2017). The participants were 28 Brazilians and a control group of nine native English speakers. Our results showed an effect of the amount of L2 oral language use on the discriminatory ability of non-native speakers of English. We discuss the role of the usage patterns captured by the questionnaire items in the acquisition of L2 phonological representations, and the connections between our findings and predictions in Exemplar Theory (BYBEE, 2001, 2010; JOHNSON, 1997, 2005; PIERREHUMBERT, 2001, 2003) for analogous representations in the L1.