Oral/written interface and biliteracy

Coordinators: Cecilia Gunnarsson and Clara Solier

 

The aim is to investigate and better understand the processes involved in the verbal formulation in L2 and their development during learning in learners of all types (typical/atypical; guided/unguided; of different levels and ages). In order to do this, it seems appropriate to refer to the model of verbal production of Levelt (1989). This model also has several adaptations to writing (Gunnarsson-Largy et al., 2019; Largy, 2002, Van Wijk, 1999) and reflects the different encodings involved in the formulation process, where the pre-verbal message finds its linguistic form. This linguistic form consists of an abstract grammatical structure (forms) and semantic elements (lems) recovered from the mental lexicon, and associated with a functional surface structure which in a second stage finds its phonological and/or graphic form, internal language (voice and/or vision), before being pronounced out loud or transcribed. It is also during the formulation process that the oral/written interface plays an important role.

At first glance, one might imagine that this interface is unidirectional and concerns only written production wherever the process of the formulator ends in an internal voice (phonological suite), which must subsequently be encoded according to the writing system in question, alphabetical, syllable or morphosyllabic (The universal phonological principal, Perfetti, Zhang & Berent, 1992). According to the writing system, the link between the phonological system and the graphaemic system differs from one language to another and may be more or less direct. Research has shown, however, that at least in L2, the written form and pronunciation rules of graphems in L1 have an impact on the pronunciation of certain graphems in L2 (e.g., Bassetti, 2017, 2021, 2023; Bassetti et al., 2015; Bassetti & Atkinson, 2015; Mairano et al., 2018; Mouquet & Mariano, 2023, Santiago & Mairano, 2021), even when L1 has a non-alphabetic writing system (Sokolović-Perović et al., 2020). It therefore seems that the oral/written interface is bi-directional.

For the moment this interface has been explored mainly to measure the direct impact of phonology on spelling or spelling on pronunciation. If reference is made to the Levelt model, other factors, such as semantics and morphology, are also to be considered.

The questions asked are:

What is the respective influence of oral and written in the formulation process? What is the process of recovering lemmes and forms in the mental lexicon?  

Approaches :

• the role of semantics, morphology

• the role of written form in the perception and production of oral

• the role of the phonological form in the perception and production of writing

• activation of phonological/orthographic forms

• impact system d'écriture/profondeur orthographique

• MdT impact

• …

Populations : see below (Biliteracy)

Variables : see below (Biliteracy)

Biliteracy

Multilingualism is becoming the norm in the world, and there is growing interest in the question of bi (multi ?)literacy.

While translinguistic influences have been widely studied for the oral language, the question of learning a new writing system or of managing several writing systems is less addressed in the literature.

In recent years, it is the spelling effects that have been studied mainly, on perception, production, learning and phonological consciousness, at the lexical or phonological level.

While the majority of L2 learners in institutional context are exposed to oral and written input from the beginning of learning, the written input being often much more present than the oral input, it is surprising that this question of the predominance of written language has not been addressed in literature. Moreover, while the oral slope is highly studied, the written slope is not. There are few models for L2 written production and no written production models for isolated words, for example.

Several approaches for the same goal :

• Biliteracie in development:

  • All types of learners L_n (L2, L3, deaf, atypical, literal or not)

• Billiteracie already present:

  • Users L_n all types (see above)

  • Bilinguals (all the spectrosm)

Variables to consider :

- L1 writing systems and non-native language (type and transparency/opacity)

- Tasks (different levels: phonemes, words, text...)
 

Conclusion

It is therefore essential to study the writing processes in L2, the development of the linguistic knowledge involved in these processes (orthographic and phonological), and the role of writing systems in their appropriation in order to better understand multilingual language cognition. This would enable the production models written in L2/Ln to be fed, the links between spelling and phonology to be considered, and the need to model these links at the theoretical level.

This work would be of direct interest to the clinical field, such as speech therapy, in the diagnosis and management of written language disorders in people with multiple language systems. It would also have a strong impact on education and social policies.

 

To join this group, find out the list of members, explore the list of past activities, read about upcoming activities, subscribe to the mailing list: https://groups.renater.fr/sympa/subscribe/real.oral-ecrit