The role of phonology during visual word learning in adults: An integrative review

Abstract

Throughout their lifetime, adults learn new words in their native lannguage, and potentially also in a second language. However, they do so with variable levels of success. In the auditory word learning literature, some of this variability has been attributed to phonological skills, including decoding and phonological short-term memory. Here I examine how the relationship between phonological skills and word learning applies to the visual modality. I define the availability of phonology in terms of (1) the extent to which it is biased by the learning environment, (2) the characteristics of the words to be learned, and (3) individual differences in phonological skills. Across these three areas of research, visual word learning improves when phonology is made more available to adult learners, suggesting that phonology can facilitate learning across modalities. However, the facilitation is largely specific to alphabetic languages, which have predictable sublexical correspondences between orthography and phonology. Therefore, I propose that phonology bootstraps visual word learning by providing a secondary code that constrains and refines developing orthographic representations. Keywords Adult word learning. Orthographic processing. Phonological recoding. Lexical quality Adults continually learn new words in their native language (L1), and possibly also in a second language (L2), making vocabulary one of the few aspects of language that continues to expand throughout the lifespan (e.g., Ramscar, Hendrix, Shaoul, Milin, & Baayen, 2014; Verhaeghen, 2003). Establishing a rich vocabulary is a key prerequisite for success in areas as varied as reading comprehension, syntax development, and foreign language proficiency (e.g., Meschyan & Hernandez, 2002; Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007). Whereas learning new words comes easy to some, it is a challenge for others, and the factors that underlie this variability remain poorly understood. Building on the growing evidence that strong phonological abilities improve the acquisition of new auditory word forms (e.g.

Contrasting Similar Words Facilitates Second Language Vocabulary Learning in Children by Sharpening Lexical Representations

“…However, as we discussed in the introduction, phonology plays an important role in acquiring new words visually. This is especially true for children, who have less well-developed orthographic and semantic representations (Perfetti, 2007 ; van Goch, 2016 ; Janssen, 2017 ; Meade, 2020 ). While we did not explicitly offer phonological information in our learning task, we assume that children automatically activated phonology when reading the words (Frost, 1998 ).…”

The impact of language proficiency on the time course and neural basis of L2 semantic access in bilinguals

“…At a lower proficiency level, the connection of L2 words to concepts is still weak. So, less proficient participants may need a greater facilitation of phonological information via orthography–phonology sub-lexical link to retrieve semantic representation in visual word recognition (Bassetti et al, 2015; Meade, 2019), which may require greater articulatory control effort, and hence an increase in the activation of left insula was observed. This co-activation gradually decreases after L2 proficiency increases to a higher level.…”

Graphomotor memory in Exner’s area enhances word learning in the blind

“…It is therefore possible that, even in adulthood, motor codes of writing exert beneficial effects on word learning when visual or auditory sensory inputs are restricted. In particular, while the crossmodal interaction between the visual and phonological systems is thought to play a primary role in adult word learning 27 , 28 , such learning mechanism enhanced by literacy should be compromised by the long-term deprivation of visual inputs in the late-blind, which can attenuate visual memory retrieval 29 , 30 but may allow more cognitive resources for exploiting motor codes during word learning. We thus hypothesized that Exner’s area involved in the motor memory for handwriting should play a greater role in word learning for those blind people than for sighted people.…”