Orthographic accents and their influence on lexical stress perception in L2 word recognition.

Abstract

This study investigates how L1 background, stress perception, and orthographic cues, such as orthographic accents, influence L2 Spanish word recognition, with a focus on native speakers of English and Korean. Using a cross-modal word identification task, participants were presented with Spanish word fragments in stressed and unstressed conditions, with or without orthographic accents. The results confirmed the significant role of lexical stress in improving word recognition accuracy for both native and L2 learners. Surprisingly, L1 Korean learners outperformed native Spanish speakers in unstressed conditions, challenging the expected "stress deafness" pattern often associated with learners from non-stress languages. These findings suggest that Korean learners may rely on other cues to compensate for their difficulty processing stress. In contrast, English learners did not benefit from orthographic accents, likely due to their reliance on vowel reduction and other stress-related cues in their L1. The study concludes that L2 learners' processing of suprasegmental features, like stress, is shaped by their L1 characteristics and the specific task demands. Implications for teaching stress perception in L2 are discussed, with an emphasis on integrating both visual and auditory cues to enhance word recognition accuracy.