Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

How does phonology-orthography correspondence affect second language acquisition?

+4
−0

One difficulty I’ve seen in learning languages is matching orthography to pronunciation - especially vowels.

English has several distinct sounds that a native speaker will describe as the vowel ‘e’, for example, while a language like French would use a wider variety of symbols to represent the same set of sounds (é, è, ê, e). Moreover, mispronouncing these sounds in French seems to affect the meaning of what you are saying to a greater degree. And I may be incorrect, but I get a sense that fewer sounds map to each orthographic symbol in French vs. English (that there are more ways to pronounce ‘e’ in English vs the same symbol in French).

Is there a formal concept of how much phonology-orthography correspondence varies across and within different languages? Further, are there any theories about how phonology-orthography complexity affect word comprehension, and difficulty in acquiring a language as an L2?

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

This is the hardest question this site has seen so far (6 comments)

0 answers

Sign up to answer this question »