Influence between Writing and Speech Production and Perception: Evidence from Thai Vocalic Grapheme Acquisition by French Learners of Thai L2

Abstract

In last decades, it has been attested through numerous psycholinguistic researches that writing does exert influences on speech perception and produc­tion. Adopting a linguistic model in which writing and speech are interconnected, we provide in this paper evidences supporting this idea from a previous study on Thai vocalic grapheme acquisition by French learners of Thai L2. The study is of a psycholinguistic nature using experimental method to collect the data through reading and spelling tasks of words and pseudowords focusing on vocalic grapheme. The data were subsequently ana­lyzed with statistical tools. It is found that French learners of Thai L2 made a distinction for Thai short/long vocalic opposition and monoph­thong/diphthong vocalic opposition only in spelling and the distinction for Thai primary/secondary vocalic opposition only in reading. According to the data and our reasoning here-by exposed, this led us to propose that writing can exert certain influence on speech perception and production.