The Impact of Decoding Ease on Lexical Quality of Word Representations in L2

When learning a new word, a robust lexical representation needs to be formed, including of its written (orthographic) form, spoken (phonological) form, and meaning (semantics), with strong associations between them. Previous research in monolingual, English-speaking adults suggests that the quality of these lexical representations may be affected by how easy words are to read (decode print-to-sound) during acquisition: Hulme et al. (2022) exposed monolingual, English-speaking adults to written pseudowords embedded in paragraphs. These pseudowords differed in how easy their spelling-sound mappings were to decode for monolingual L1-English speakers (e.g., easy: bamper; hard: uzide). Subsequently, the quality of participants’ orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations of the pseudowords were tested. Results showed that, as predicted, decoding ease impacted how well words were learned. In this study, we will investigate to what extent Hulme et al.’s (2022) findings can be observed in L2-English learners whose L1 (German) is more orthographically transparent than English.