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Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Tyler & Burnham, 2006). However, despite the long-standing acceptance of the importance of orthography in word recognition, little research has been carried out on how orthography may exert any influence on second language acquisition. The interest in orthography has so far mainly come from two fields: the field of psycholinguistics and that of reading acquisition.
In the field of psycholinguistics the focus of previous studies has often lain on the effects of spelling-to-sound inconsistencies and sound-to-spelling inconsistencies on word recognition (Pattamadilok, Morais, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2007; Ziegler & Ferrand, 1998; Ziegler, Petrova, & Ferrand, 2008). The aim is to get an insight into how exactly graphemes are mapped onto phonemes in the minds of literate people and into the extent to which there is feedback between the lexical and the phonological and orthographical components.
The onset of reading has been shown to have an effect on the child's developing phonological system (Goswami, Ziegler, & Richardson, 2005). First language acquisition studies often aim at examining to what extent learning to read promotes phonemic awareness (or syllabic awareness, in some non-alphabetic languages) or to what extent this awareness assists children in the acquisition of their language's writing system (Nunes, Bryant, & Olsson, 2003; Pan & Chen, 2005). With respect to L2 reading and writing, the edited volume by Cook and Bassetti (2005) presents a collection of studies dealing with the question of how reading and writing in a second language are related to first and second language writing systems.
The implications of the connection between orthography and phonology for second language phonology have only recently been addressed by a number of researchers. For instance, Weber and Cutler (2004) suggest that orthographic knowledge may influence L2 spoken word processing. Evidence for this was presented by Escudero, Hayes-Harb, and Mitterer (2008), who showed that orthographic input during training on novel words influenced the word recognition pattern of the listeners.
In sum, the relationship between orthography and phonology or phonological acquisition...