This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…

Jawi is the orthography in which Malay has been written since the Middle Ages, when it was adapted from the Arabic script. Introduced by Muslim traders, it was adapted to Malay phonology using diacritics that modified six letters. It was used until the Roman script (Rumi) brought in by European traders and colonisers began to supplant it in the…

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

Romanized transliteration is widely used in internet communication and global commerce, yet we know little about its behavioural and neural processing. Here, we show that Romanized text imposes a significant neurocognitive load. Readers faced greater difficulty in identifying concrete words written in Romanized transliteration (Romanagari)…

This dissertation examines the influence of L2 orthographic representation on the phonological development of American English speakers learning Korean, addressing specifically the syllabification and resyllabification of Korean intervocalic obstruents and the intervocalic liquid phoneme. Although Korean and English both employ alphabetic writing…

This study compares second-year Japanese university students' strategies to write kanji by hand with their strategies to produce the kanji characters on a computer, taking into account factors such as accuracy in writing, the amount of kanji used, the complexity of the kanji used, as well as how the characters used compare with the sequence…

This paper challenges from a practical point of view the idea that the phonemic principle is the most adequate or the optimal theoretical basis for devising a romanized alphabet for a language. In the past, romanization of languages, written or unwritten, have largely been based on the phonemic principle and have unnecessarily burdened the learner…

The relatedness of phonological coding to the articulatory mechanisms in visual word recognition vary in different writing systems. While articulatory suppression (i.e., continuous verbalising during a visual word processing task) has a detrimental effect on the processing of Japanese words printed in regular syllabic Khana script, it has no such…

This guide provides an overview of the salient features of the Japanese language from the perspective of the beginning-level English-speaking learner. Chapters address these topics: the Japanese language and its historic and cultural setting; phonology (sounds and syllables, word accentuation; loanwords; connected speech); writing (scripts,…