cross-lingual analysis of pseudo-homophone recognition in language learners: phonological evidence for word recognition

This study aimed to examine the cross-lingual recognition of french and english words and their pseudo-homophones to verify the presence of grapheme-phoneme conversion (gpc) for the word recognition of foreign language learners. considering the study’s purposes, 100 iranian advanced english and french learners were chosen and recruited for the study through the convenience sampling procedure. the participants’ homogeneity and proficiency level were checked with the aid of an english proficiency test (mcmillan placement test (mpt)) and a french proficiency test (test d’évaluation de français (tef)) before the examination phase. to investigate the participants’ reaction times for recognizing the real words, illegal nonwords, and legal nonwords (pseudo-homophones), a computerized test was designed that sought the participants’ judgments about the presented linguistic construct on the screen. the employed words were chosen according to their morphological complexity, frequency, and length from the learners’ course books. data analysis revealed that pseudo-homophones were more challenging for both english and french learners to recognize; this was shown by their higher reaction time needed for recognizing pseudo-homophones compared with the real words and the illegal nonwords. although the occurrence of gpc for both groups was attested, it was significantly stronger for the french learners. these findings suggest that word recognition is inherently a phonological process (not an orthographic one) among foreign language learners.