The present study investigated orthographic and phonological processing in L2 French spoken word recognition by Finnish learners of French, using the masked cross-modal priming paradigm. Experiment 1 showed a repetition effect in L2 within-language priming that was most pronounced for high proficiency learners and a significant effect for French pseudohomophones. In the between-language Experiment 2, high proficiency learners showed significant facilitation from L1 Finnish to L2 French shared orthography in the absence of phonological and semantic overlap. This effect was not observed in the lower intermediate group, which showed a significant benefit of L1 pseudohomophones instead. The orthographic effect in the high proficiency group was modulated by subjective familiarity showing facilitation for less familiar but not for highly familiar words. The results suggest that with L2 learners, the extent to which orthographic information affects L2 spoken word recognition depends on their L2 proficiency.

The use of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word recognition was studied in a visual world task where L1 Finnish learners of L2 French (n = 64) and L1 French native speakers (n = 24) were asked to match spoken word forms with printed words while their eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1, French target words were contrasted with competitors having a longer ( vs. ) or a shorter word initial phonological overlap ( vs. ) and an identical orthographic overlap. In Experiment 2, target words were contrasted with competitors of either longer ( vs. ) or shorter word initial orthographic overlap ( vs. ) and of an identical phonological overlap. A general phonological effect was observed in the L2 listener group but not in the L1 control group. No general orthographic effects were observed in the L2 or L1 groups, but a significant effect of proficiency was observed for orthographic overlap over time: higher proficiency L2 listeners used also orthographic information in the matching task in a time-window from 400 to 700 ms, whereas no such effect was observed for lower proficiency listeners. These results suggest that the activation of orthographic information in L2 spoken word recognition depends on proficiency in L2.

This study investigated the time course of activation of orthographic information in spoken word recognition with two visual world eye-tracking experiments in a task where second language (L2) spoken word forms had to be matched with their printed referents. Participants (n = 64) were native Finnish learners of L2 French ranging from beginners to highly proficient. In Experiment 1, L2 targets (e.g., /sidʀ/) were presented with either orthographically overlapping onset competitors (e.g., /sɛtʀ/) or phonologically overlapping onset competitors ( /sikl/). In Experiment 2, L2 targets (e.g., /pom/) were associated with competitors in Finnish, L1 of the participants, in conditions symmetric to Experiment 1 ( /pauhu/ vs. /pom:i/). In the withinlanguage experiment (Experiment 1), the difference in target identification between the experimental conditions was not significant. In the between-language experiment (Experiment 2), orthographic information impacted the mapping more in lower proficiency learners, and this effect was observed 600 ms after the target word onset. The influence of proficiency on the matching was nonlinear: proficiency impacted the mapping significantly more in the lower half of the proficiency scale in both experiments. These results are discussed in terms of coactivation of orthographic and phonological information in L2 spoken word recognition.

In this paper, we examine some of the factors that might influence the accessing of meanings of written and spoken L3 words. We tested learners of L3 French who had Finnish as their L1 and were highly competent in L2 English. They were presented with L3 French words in written and spoken form, and were asked to give a possible translation for the target word in L1 and to rate their level of confidence in the meaning given. Because of their instructional learning background, we expected orthographic forms to be more familiar than phonological ones. This hypothesis was confirmed. The meanings of the L3 words presented were accessed more easily and more accurately in the orthographic than in the phonological modality, although this asymmetry decreased with a higher level of proficiency. The confidence ratings were negatively affected by a similarity to L2 words. General implications for L3 lexical knowledge are discussed.

This paper discusses studying optional languages at upper secondary school in Finland, and in particular students’ views on dropping the optional language. The number of students choosing an optional language has decreased during the past decades. In earlier studies, teachers have suggested that a heavy workload might be one of the main reasons for this decrease. We interviewed nine students at upper secondary school and here we concentrate on those four who discontinued their optional language studies. The data were analysed via content analysis. The results show that the reasons behind dropping an optional language are manifold, and can be traced to individual values, but also to school structures and to how society seems to value languages. Heavy workload is also reflected in answers in different ways: the participants acknowledged that good language skills take time and effort which they were not always willing to invest in.