Orthography affects L1 and L2 speech perception but not production in early bilinguals

Abstract Orthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 grapheme-phoneme correspondences influence bilingual speech perception production, even when languages have been acquired early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque Basque–Spanish bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque pseudowords created by replacing /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take the same orthographic form, <z>. Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks to test sounds form were produced similarly two languages. Results for groups showed orthography had strong effects but no production. Taken together, these findings suggest that system of does not automatically lead non-native