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Meaning and orthography in L2FrenchJessica L. Sturm aa School of Languages and Cultures , Purdue University , WestLafayette , IN , USAPublished online: 19 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Jessica L. Sturm (2012) Meaning and orthography in L2 French, WritingSystems Research, 4:1, 47-60, DOI: 10.1080/17586801.2011.635950

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Meaning and orthography in L2 French

Jessica L. Sturm

School of Languages and Cultures, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

While considerable research has been conducted on the acquisition of vocabulary in L2learning, less attention has been paid to the acquisition of L2 orthography. The presentresearch looks at the acquisition of one aspect of L2 orthography*accent marks in L2French*for learners whose L1, English, does not feature accent marks. Specifically, thisstudy investigates the effects of the knowledge of a word’s meaning, or lack thereof, onlearners’ ability to place accent marks on target items as well as to recognise accentedversions of the same target items. Results suggest that exposure to a word’s meaningincreases learners’ ability to recognise the correctly accented version, but not the ability toplace the missing accent.

Keywords: Classroom SLA; Orthography; Vocabulary; Technology in L2A; Accent marks.

INTRODUCTION

French is consistently cited as having one of the most opaque orthographies

(Borgwaldt, Hellwig, & De Groot, 2004, 2005; Jaffre, 2005a). This presents difficulties

for learners of L2 French as they work to acquire vocabulary and target-like

pronunciation. In addition to its orthographic opacity, French also features a complex

system of accent marks. In fact, while many other languages use accent marks

(Spanish, Italian, German, etc.), the French system of accent marks is the most

complex among those commonly taught in the USA; French uses five accent marks

(acute, grave, circumflex, diaeresis and cedilla), while Spanish uses three (acute,

diaeresis and tilde), and German uses one (diaeresis) (Wells, 2000). Italian uses two,

the acute and grave accents (D. Rodgers, personal communication, February 9, 2011).

In French, in some cases, accent marks serve as pronunciation guides (for example e

(e), e (o)), and as orthographic ornamentation, often with historical significance (a, u,

o) in others (Tranel, 1998). These features carry communicative weight; for example,

there are some orthographic minimal pairs (‘‘a’’/‘‘(il/elle) a’’ (at/he or she has), ‘‘ou’’/

‘‘ou’’ (where/or), ‘‘sur’’/‘‘sur’’ (certain/on)] that differ only by their presence and

absence. Other phonological minimal pairs consist of the first or third person singular

of the present tense and the past participle of regular verbs ending in Ber� (e.g., ‘‘je/

il/elle parle’’, ‘‘parle’’ (I/he or she speaks, spoken)). The lack of accent marks in

Correspondence should be addressed to Jessica L. Sturm, Purdue University, Stanley Coulter Hall, 640

Oval Dr, West Lafayette, IN 47901, USA. E-mail: jsturm@purdue.edu

The author wishes to thank Frederique Grim, Jessica S. Miller, Daryl Rodgers, Viviane Ruellot, Anita

Saalfeld, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments. All errors that remain are mine.

WRITING SYSTEMS RESEARCH

2012, 4 (1), 47�60

# 2012 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business

http://www.tandfonline.com/pwsr http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2011.635950

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English makes this aspect of L2 French especially difficult for learners, when it has

been suggested that phonological�orthographic processing is important for attaining

proficiency in a foreign language. For example, Sparks et al. (1997) found foreign word

decoding (a direct measure of students’ skill in the phonological�orthographic . . .component of the foreign language, p. 557) to be one of the best predictors of overall

foreign language proficiency.

As accent marks are an integral part of French orthography, and as acquisition of

orthography is part of vocabulary building (cf. Ehri & Rosenthal, 2007; Lalande &

Gagne, 1988; Pagada & Schmitt, 2006; Schneider, Healy, & Bourne, 2002), the

acquisition of accent marks in L2 French is an important area of study for Second

Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers. This is particularly true in light of the position

of French as one of the more widely-taught L2s in the USA, where most students’ L1does not include accent marks, as discussed above. Furthermore, the influence of

phonological�orthographic processing on L2 acquisition, as discussed by Sparks et al.

(1997) highlights the importance of L2 orthography acquisition. The present research

seeks to investigate whether learning the meaning of the word (the normal condition of

learning a word: meaning and form) facilitates acquisition of accent marks.

REVIEW OF PREVIOUS RESEARCH

Accent marks in L2 French

According to Pagada and Schmitt (2006), a word missing its accent(s) is not 100%

correct. As discussed above, the omission of an accent mark can change the meaning

of a word, and often changes its pronunciation. Gascoigne-Lally (2000) and

Gascoigne (2006a, 2006b) found that first-semester learners of French were better

able to place accent marks on target items in a dictation task if they had typed the test

paragraph rather than written it by hand. She also found similar results in first-

semester learners of Spanish, despite the fact that learners of both French and Spanish

professed a preference for writing rather than typing in their L2 (Gascoigne, 2006a).She suggested, post hoc, that it was the increased psychomotor movement in typing

that led to increased recall (Gascoigne-Lally, 2000).

Sturm (2006, 2008, 2010) and Sturm and Golato (2005), investigating Gascoigne-

Lally (2000) and Gascoigne’s (2006a, 2006b) above post hoc hypothesis, separated

first-semester learners into three groups. One group wrote target items by hand; the

other two groups typed them using one of two methods to make accented letters:

multiple keystrokes (Alt�numeric codes) or single keystroke (pre-programmed keys).

Sturm (2006) and Sturm and Golato (2005) did not find a significant differencebetween any of the three groups. Sturm (2008, 2010), however, did find significant

differences between the handwriting group and each typing group, but no significant

differences between the two typing groups, which differed on the number of keystrokes

needed to make an accented letter. In other words, between two conditions that

differed only on the amount of movement needed to make an accented letter, there was

no statistically significant difference in performance. She concluded that the

advantages afforded by typing were not caused by increased psychomotor movement.

While Sturm (2006, 2008, 2010) and Sturm and Golato (2005) selected words thattheir participants did not know, Gascoigne-Lally (2000) and Gascoigne (2006a,

2006b) assumed that her participants did understand the meaning of the paragraph

she chose (C. Gascoigne, personal communication, September 11, 2007). Sturm (2008)

noted the lack of instruction of the meanings of words in her research and suggested a

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study in which half of the participants were exposed to the meanings of target words,

to investigate any possible effect.

With the advent of computer mediated and other instantaneous communication,

many aspects of orthography and usage are excluded in electronic messages. In French,this phenomenon often leads to omitted accent marks. However, van Compernolle

and Williams (2010), from their analysis of a collected corpus of Internet Relay Chat

and another corpus from Internet forums (40,000 words per corpus), found that: ‘‘in

spite of any perceived destabilizing effect on writing/printing caused by the Internet[,]

accents and diacritics have not disappeared from electronic French discourse’’ (p. 831).

In regard to the present research, van Compernolle and Williams’ (2010) findings

highlight the relevance of accent marks in French, which have been examined in the L2

context (Gascoigne, 2006a; Gascoigne, 2006b; Gascoigne-Lally, 2000; Sturm, 2006,2008, 2010; Sturm & Golato, 2005) but not exhaustively.

Orthographic depth

According to Jaffre (2005b), all orthographies of the world contain elements thatinvoke, on some level at least, the syllables or phonemes of their respective languages.

Orthographies are classified on a continuum from transparent or consistent (more

regular grapheme�phoneme correspondences) to opaque or inconsistent (less regular

grapheme�phoneme correspondences). English and French are considered to have the

most opaque orthographies among languages with alphabetic (as opposed to

logographic or syllabary) writing systems (Jaffre 2005a); the orthography of English

is held to be more opaque than that of French (Jaffre & Fayol, 2006). This distinction

is tied to the fact that French pronunciation is predictable from spelling but not viceversa (Caravolas, 2004; Jaffre & Fayol, 2006).

Accent marks are the focus of the present study for two reasons: their importance

in written French (and effects on spoken French); and the difficulty they present for

learners whose L1 is English. Wells (2000) notes that English is one of the very few

languages that use only the standard set of 26 letters in the Roman alphabet without

accent marks. He also observes that while accent marks often give pronunciation

guides, they are difficult to perceive for L2 learners. This is likely due to the vast

majority of accents in French being placed over*and thereby affecting*vowels (allexcept for the cedilla, which goes underBc� and changes its sound from /k/ to /s/

beforeBa�,Bo�, orBu�). According to Flege and MacKay (2004), vowels are

harder than consonants for L2 learners to perceive.

Acquisition of vocabulary and orthography (L1 and L2)

Hulme, Maughan, and Brown (1991) found that participants’ memory span for

foreign (L2 Italian; L1 English) words increased when they studied L1 equivalents of

the words. Recall was measured using a word span task, presented aurally and recalled

orally. While the modality of Hulme et al.’s (1991) study is different from the present

research, the facilitating effects of learning the meaning of the word should carry over

to the visual modality and paper-based recall tasks; Massaro (1975) illustrates aural

and visual modalities as parallel, yet equal, processes, from feature detection torecoding and rehearsal. According to Chaudron (1985), Massaro’s (1975) model

‘‘should apply as well to second language learners’ processing of input’’ (p. 4). In other

words, L2 learners should process visual and aural input in the same way, just with

different stimuli and physical apparatus; Hulme et al.’s results should hold even when

material is presented visually and recalled on paper.

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Schneider et al. (2002) highlight the requirement of forming complete orthographic

representation of new L2 words in L1-to-L2 learning. However, this formation of

orthographic representation is not easy; Phillips (1984, p. 179) notes: ‘‘The spelling

rules of the second language (L2) and in many cases, the need to recognize new letters,will cause other problems, and familiar patterns of spelling and expected symbol-to-

sound relationships may now be a source of confusion rather than a basis for

interpretation’’. While French uses the same (Roman) alphabet as English, the

accented versions of vowels and the consonantBc� are certainly unfamiliar, if not

new, to native Anglophone learners of L2 French.

According to Ehri and Rosenthal (2007), studies show that spellings exert a

powerful influence on speech, and spellings of words influence speech. In their own

study, they found that second graders’ recall of meaning and pronunciation was higherwhen the spelling of target items was presented and that fifth graders’ recall of

pronunciation was better with spelling aids. The present study investigates whether the

opposite is true. In other words, does exposure to the meaning of the word increase

recall of spelling, specifically accent marks?

Accent marks, as discussed above, are fairly abstract for L2 learners whose L1 does

not use them. Luelsdorff (1987) discusses the abstractness hypothesis: less abstract

orthographic representations are acquired earlier than more abstract ones. In the

context of the present research, it is proposed that by presenting an image of the L2word, the concept will be less abstract and the orthographic representation will be

acquired more easily.

Levels of processing framework

The present study examines the influence of knowing a word’s meaning on acquisition

of its orthography, based on the idea that more thoroughly processed or encoded

material will be remembered at a higher rate. Craik and Lockhart (1972) first

proposed this ‘‘levels of processing’’ framework. Craik and Tulving (1975) performed

10 experiments whose results support levels-of-processing framework; in their

experiments, shallow processing was equated with analysis of the typescript,

intermediate processing with phonological analysis (rhymes), and deep processing

with semantic or syntactic analysis. This framework continues to be discussed andexplored, up to the present; it is the framework in which Hummel (2010), among

others, situated her study.

According to Gallo, Meadow, Johnson, and Foster (2008), thinking about the

meaning of studied words constitutes deep processing and enhances memory relative

to focusing solely on perceptual features. Gallo et al. define the levels-of-processing

effect as ‘‘the finding that memory for a list of words is better when the meaning or

semantics of the words is encoded’’ (p. 1095). ‘‘Meaningful processing’’, in their view,

differentiates words more than surface levels of processing. This deeper processingactivates the ‘‘distinctiveness heuristic’’, defined by Gallo, Weiss, and Schacter (2004)

as ‘‘a diagnostic monitoring process’’ (p. 473). In the present research, learning the

meaning of a test item is meaningful processing, whereas the simple transcription

typing of the word is considered surface-level processing, and it is anticipated that the

meaningful processing condition will lead to better retention of the word.

Gaps in the literature

Most research in orthography has looked at L1 acquisition (Bredel, 2009; Cunningham

& Stanovich, 1990; Dehn, 1993; Ehri & Rosenthal, 2007; Lalande & Gagne, 1988;

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Mann, 1985; Moreira, 1995, 1999, 2001; Parubchenko, 1997; Planas de Dietrich, 1994;

Tuana, 1980; Vaughn et al., 1993). Much of the L2 orthography research has focused

on L2 English (Luelsdorff, 1987, 1988, 1991; Luelsdorff & Eyland, 1989; Prince, 1996),

and very little has looked specifically at accent marks in an L2 (Gascoigne, 2006a,2006b; Gascoigne-Lally, 2000; Sturm, 2006, 2008, 2010; Sturm & Golato, 2005;

Wieczorek, 1991). This research seeks to fill a gap in the literature by looking at an L2

other than English (French), focusing on accent marks. It also departs from vocabulary

research, which tends to look at the effect of reading and context on L2 vocabulary

(Barcroft, 2003; Day and Swan, 1988; Frantzen, 2003; Joe, 2010; Laufer, 2001; Laufer

& Hulstijn, 2001; Pagada & Schmitt, 2006; Verhallen & Bus, 2010[Reference citation;

Zahar, Cobb, & Spada, 2001).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS/HYPOTHESES

The present research was designed to test the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Participants who were exposed to the meanings of target items before

transcribing them will be better able to recognise correctly accented versions of target

items than participants who were not exposed to meanings.

Hypothesis 2: Participants who were exposed to the meanings of target items before

transcribing them will be better able to place accent marks on target items than

participants who were not exposed to meanings.

METHODOLOGY

Participants

Participants (N�62) were students enrolled in second-semester French (FR 102) at a

large public Midwestern university, and were native speakers of English, as verified bya biographical questionnaire. They were recruited in-class by the researcher, who

was not the instructor for any section of FR 102. She did, however, administer all

tasks during regularly scheduled class periods. Participation was voluntary and

participants were not compensated in any way. Data were collected in ten sections of

FR 102, over two semesters. Participants were divided by class section into two

groups: meaning (N�29) and control (N�33).

In addition, 14 participants were not present for the delayed posttests; their data

were kept for the analyses of the immediate posttests and the pre-test. Consequently,for the delayed posttests, N�48.

Materials

As all the participants had studied French before, one goal of the pre-test was to find

words that none of them had learned in previous French courses. To this end, a list of

potential target items was generated. All target items were nouns that could berepresented via an image. Corresponding images were verified by 15 raters, native

speakers of English, to represent the concepts of the target items; the researcher

emailed a document containing the images and asked the raters to give the word or

words they associated with the image. If any of the raters gave the word that the

researcher was looking for, the word was retained. A second round of this inquiry was

MEANING AND ORTHOGRAPHY IN L2 FRENCH 51

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performed when some of the images did not evoke the required word; the researcher

found different images and tried other words. For the words eventually used in the

study, the following numbers of raters (in parentheses) gave the intended word:

‘‘boıte’’/‘‘box’’ (9), ‘‘cloture’’/‘‘fence’’ (11), ‘‘eventail’’/‘‘fan’’ (11), ‘‘fleche’’/‘‘arrow’’

(7), ‘‘glacon’’/‘‘ice cube’’ (10), ‘‘pate’’/‘‘dough’’ (4), ‘‘piqure’’/‘‘shot’’ or ‘‘injection’’ (9),

and ‘‘pretre’’/‘‘priest’’ (8).

Target items bore one accent mark each and were either taken from A Frequency

Dictionary of French: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Lonsdale & Le Bras, 2009) or

were derived from words found in the dictionary (e.g., ‘‘glacon’’ [ice cube] from

‘‘glace’’ [ice]), as a means to control for frequency of words. A Frequency Dictionary of

French lists the 5,000 most frequent words in French, based on a corpus of French

written and oral (transcribed) texts, collected specifically for the purpose of creating

the dictionary. Distracter items, matching the target items for word length (� number

of letters) were added to the list of target items. From this list, a pre-test was created,

and included two tasks. The first task was a recognition task, in which participants

were asked to choose the correctly spelled version of target items and distracters,

presented in a different randomised order for each posttest, among four choices.

These four choices differed only by presence/absence and correctness of accent marks.

For example:

kfete fete fete fete

The recognition task was administered to ensure that the control and experimental

groups were equivalent on their knowledge of accent mark placement on L2 French

words at the outset of the study, and data were analysed using a two-tailed t-Test.

Results of the analysis are discussed below.

For the second task, target items and distracters were presented in randomised

order and participants were asked to give the English equivalent if they knew it. This

translation task allowed the researcher to construct a list of target items that were

unknown to all the participants. The researcher reviewed the pre-test and eliminated

the target items that any participant knew. However, distracters were not eliminated if

any participants knew them; they were kept to ensure the availability of words

matched for length and to create a coherent paragraph (see below). From the

remaining target items and distracters, the following list was generated (English

translation):

banque bank glacon ice cube

boıte box jour day

bureau desk/office journal newspaper

chemin path maison house

cloture fence pate dough

eventail fan personne person

femme woman piqure shot/injection

fleche arrow pretre priest

A paragraph containing all of the words was constructed (target items):

Un jour, le pretre va chez le docteur pour un piqure. Au bureau, il suit la fleche et

trouve son docteur. En partant, sur son chemin, il voit la banque, un cloture

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blanc,1 une boıte vide, et une personne. C’est une femme qui utilise un journal comme

un eventail. Dans sa maison, il fait une pate pour une quiche. Il fait chaud, donc il

prend un glacon dans sa boisson.

One day, the priest goes to the doctor for an injection. At the office, he follows the

arrow and finds his doctor. While leaving, on his path, he sees the bank, a white fence,

an empty box and a person. It’s a woman who is using a newspaper like a fan. In his

house, he makes dough for a quiche. It’s hot, so he takes an ice cube in his drink.

Posttests consisted of two tasks: a recognition task, as described above, and a

placement task that consisted of the paragraph with all accent marks removed.

Participants were asked to add the missing accent marks. Sturm (2008, 2010) discusses

the inherent difficulty of the dictation task at the beginning level of L2 learning; the

placement task was chosen as an alternative that would test the ability to put accents

in the correct place without the processing burden of a dictation task.

On the recognition task, participants earned one point for every correctly identified

target item. On the placement task, participants earned one point for a correctly

placed accent mark: �0.5 for the wrong accent mark in the correct place on the word;

�0.5 for an accent mark over the wrong letter on an accented word; and �1 for no

accent mark where there should have been one (based on Sturm, 2008, 2010).

Procedure

The procedure was adapted from Gascoigne-Lally (2000) Gascoigne (2006a, 2006b)

and Sturm and Golato (2005). On the first day of the study, participants took the pre-

test in class. They were asked to give the English equivalent, if they knew it, of all the

potential target items. Two days later (Day 3), during a regularly scheduled computer

lab day, they completed the treatment task as well as the immediate posttest.Before the treatment, the participants in the �meaning group (M) watched a

PowerPoint presentation with the target items and distracters along with the images

that had been verified before the experiment. The target items and distracters were

printed in French above the image on each PowerPoint slide. The researcher read the

words aloud (in French) and asked the students if they understood the word. She did

not give the English equivalent but waited for one of the participants to provide it. The

PowerPoint format allowed the researcher to gesture and point at the relevant features

or part of the image displayed (i.e., the path in the image representing ‘‘chemin’’). Ehri

and Rosenthal (2007, p. 402) suggest that the use of pictures ‘‘enable[s] the formation

of visual images in the memory’’. Skinner and Fernandes (2010) found that encoding

increased when unrelated visual images were presented. Gallo et al. (2004) found that

presenting pictures along with stimuli led to fewer false recognitions of a stimulus item

than presenting the item paired with the same item printed in red.

For the treatment, participants were asked to type the paragraph containing all the

target items into a blank document in MS Word. After they had completed that task,

they were asked to close the files, return the papers with the paragraph, and then

the researcher distributed the immediate posttest. First, participants completed the

placement task, followed by the recognition task. The control group completed the

1 ‘‘Cloture’’ and ‘‘piqure’’ are actually feminine; these typos were not caught by the researcher until the

study was in progress. Since the point of the study was to look at the acquisition of orthography, not

grammatical gender, it was decided to leave the materials as they were for the second semester of data

collection.

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typing activity and the two posttest tasks, without the meaning PowerPoint

presentation. One week after the treatment and immediate posttest (Day 10),

participants completed the delayed posttest in class. The format of the delayed

posttest was identical to that of the immediate posttest.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 1 below illustrates the group means for all four posttest measures: immediate

posttest recognition (IPR), immediate posttest placement (IPP), delayed posttest

recognition (DPR) and delayed posttest placement (DPP).

Pre-test (recognition)

The recognition task of the pre-test was administered to ensure that both groups were

equivalent in their knowledge of placement of accent marks in L2 French at the outset

of the study. A two-tailed t-Test revealed no significant difference between groups on

the recognition task of the pre-test t(60)��0.40; p�.69. This suggests that both

groups were equivalent in their knowledge of accent mark placement in French at the

outset of the study. Descriptive statistics are provided in Table 1.

Immediate posttest recognition

The recognition task of the immediate posttest was administered to test Hypothesis 1.

A two-tailed t-Test indicated that the meaning group (M�6.17, SD�1.26) performed

better than the control group (M�5.45, SD�1.52) on the recognition task of the

immediate posttest t(60)��2.008; p�.049. The effect size was medium, Cohen’s

d��0.52. This suggests that being exposed to the meaning of words increased

participants’ ability to recognise correctly accented versions of target words, thus

supporting Hypothesis 1. Descriptive statistics are provided in Table 2.

Immediate posttest placement

The placement task of the immediate posttest was administered to test Hypothesis 2.

A two-tailed t-Test showed no significant difference between groups on the placement

Figure 1. Group means for posttest measures.

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task of the immediate posttest, t(60)��0.33; p�.75. This suggests that exposure to

words’ meanings had no effect on participants’ ability to place accent marks on target

items. Descriptive statistics are provided in Table 3.

Delayed posttest recognition

The recognition task of the delayed posttest was administered to look at long-term

effects of Hypothesis 1. A two-tailed t-Test revealed no significant difference between

groups on the recognition task of the delayed posttest, t(46)��0.45; p�.66. This

suggests that exposure to words’ meanings had no long-term effect on participants’

ability to recognise correctly accented versions of words. Descriptive statistics are

provided in Table 4.

Delayed posttest placement

The placement task of the delayed posttest was administered to look at long-term effects

of Hypothesis 2. A two-tailed t-Test revealed no significant difference between groups

on the placement task of the delayed posttest, t(46)��0.89; p�.38. This suggests

that exposure to words’ meanings had no long-term effect on participants’ ability

to place accent marks on target words. Descriptive statistics are provided in Table 5.

Taken together, the results indicate an effect of exposure to target items’ meanings

on the acquisition of accent marks in L2 French, only on the ability to recognise the

correctly accented versions of words. However, there was no long-term effect. Therewere no significant differences observed between groups on the placement task, either

immediately or 1 week after treatment.

Analysis of error types

On the recognition tasks, there were two general types of errors a participant could

commit: choosing a word without the accent (glacon) or choosing the wrong accent

(fleche); both errors scored 0. On the placement tasks, a participant could omit an

accent (�1 point), put the wrong accent over the correct letter (�0.5) or put the

accent (right or wrong) over the wrong letter (�0.5).In general, accent marks were wrong more often than they were omitted, except for

the following: the meaning group chose accentless forms of words (28) more often

than they chose a wrongly accented word (18) on the IPR task. Both groups omitted

the accent mark more often than they wrote an incorrect(ly placed) accent mark on the

TABLE 2Immediate posttest recognition

Group N Mean (SD) Variance Standard error Minimum Maximum

Control 33 5.45 (1.52) 2.32 0.27 2 8

Meaning 29 6.17 (1.25) 1.58 0.23 3 8

TABLE 1Descriptive statistics, pretest (recognition)

Group N Mean (SD) Variance Standard error Minimum Maximum

Control 33 15.15 (3.79) 14.38 0.66 8 23

Meaning 29 15.62 (5.44) 15.62 1.01 6 28

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DPP task. Consider the possibilities for incorrectness in writing/choosing the wrong

accent: on the recognition task, there were two incorrectly accented forms and only

one accentless form. On the placement task, on the other hand, the potential for

writing the wrong accent in the right place or writing an accent in the wrong place is

exponentially greater than the ways in which one can omit the answer. It is logical that

there should be more ‘‘wrongs’’ than omissions. It is notable, then, that there were

more omissions on the task where a statistically significant difference was observed

(the IPR task), and that the group that outperformed its counterpart had more

omissions than ‘‘wrongs’’. It is not the case that the meaning group chose the

accentless form (28 times) more often than the control group (29 times), but that the

meaning group chose an incorrectly accented form far less often (18) than those in

the control group (52). In other words, learners in the meaning group, if they chose

an accented form, chose the right one. The ability to choose the correctly accented

form led to the significant difference between group scores; learning the meaning led

participants in the meaning group to avoid the incorrectly accented forms.

On each placement task, learners in both groups were more likely to write an accent

in the wrong place than to write the wrong accent in the right place. This is the more

egregious error; it shows that while participants knew that a word carried an accent

mark, they did not know where it belonged (and often it was the wrong accent mark,

anyway). That is why an accent mark in the wrong place scored�0.5 as opposed to

�0.5 for the wrong accent mark in the right place; omitting the accent mark

altogether, of course, demonstrated the least ability and was scored�1. ‘‘Fleche’’ was

the most often mis-accented on the placement task, followed by ‘‘piqure’’. ‘‘Glacon’’,

on both the recognition and placement tasks, was the target item which induced the

fewest errors, likely because the cedilla is the only accent mark in French that is

attached to a consonant and makes the most phonologically salient sound change for

learners: /s/ rather than /k/ beforeBa�,Bo� andBu� (recall that Flege and

MacKay (2004) note that vowel sounds are harder for L2 learners to perceive).

DISCUSSION

On the placement task, at both times of administration, the SD for each group was

large in comparison to the group means. At the immediate posttest, the SD was 2.49

for the control group (M�3.65) and 3.05 for the meaning group (M�3.86). In other

words, not only were the group means not very different, the amount of variation

TABLE 4Delayed posttest recognition

Group N Mean (SD) Variance Standard error Minimum Maximum

Control 25 4.92 (1.19) 1.41 0.24 3 7

Meaning 23 5.09 (1.41) 1.99 0.29 2 7

TABLE 3Immediate posttest placement

Group N Mean (SD) Variance Standard error Minimum Maximum

Control 33 3.67 (2.47) 6.10 0.43 �1.5 8

Meaning 29 3.90 (3.07) 9.42 0.57 �3.5 8

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within each group was considerable. At the delayed posttest, the group means

(M�1.22, C�0.48) were not close, but the SD for each group was greater than each

group’s mean (M�2.79; C�2.95). These results suggest that the treatment, exposure

to words with and without their meanings, did not uniformly affect participants’

ability to place accent marks on the target items. Administering the treatment only one

time may be a cause of this lack of significant difference on the placement task; a

longer term study with multiple sessions of treatment and exposure may reveal an

effect for treatment.

On the DPR, the means were, again, very close (M�5.04; C�4.88), but the SD for

each group was not as large as on either placement task (M�1.40; C�1.17). It would

appear that while variance was reduced in the recognition tasks, any gains from

knowing a word’s meaning did not last even one week. This may be attributable, again,

to the limited nature of the treatment.

There was, however, a significant difference between groups on the IPR task, as

reported above, with a medium effect size. Even in light of the lack of significant

differences on the IPP task or either of the delayed posttest tasks, these results suggest

that exposure to the meanings of words did have an effect on the acquisition of accent

marks in L2 French. In particular, exposure to meanings led participants to choose an

incorrectly accented version of target items on a recognition task less often in the

short-term, as revealed by analysis of error types.

Why was there a short-term effect on the recognition task but not the placement

task? It is a well-established tenet of L2 acquisition that receptive skills are acquired

before productive skills. In this study, the recognition task was a very passive, or

receptive task: they had to choose between four provided options. The placement task

was more productive: participants were asked to add the accent marks to the target

paragraph. This short-term difference may be attributable to the increased exposure to

the words; the meaning group saw the words on PowerPoint slides, in addition to the

transcription task. It may also be, as Craik and Lockhart’s (1972) framework suggests,

a deeper level of processing inherent in learning a word’s meaning, rather than simply

its form. Again, the lack of long-term effect may be due to the limited amount of

exposure for either group.

CONCLUSIONS

It appears that exposure to the meaning of words had an immediate effect on the

participants’ ability to recognise correctly accented versions of words, but no effect on

their ability to place accent marks on target items. This immediate effect on

recognition task scores was due to a reduced rate of choosing an incorrectly accented

word by participants in the meaning group. In other words, exposure to the meanings

of words influenced participants to reject the wrong accent mark on the word more

often on a recognition task. The exposure to meanings led participants to encode and

TABLE 5Delayed posttest placement

Group N Mean (SD) Variance Standard error Minimum Maximum

Control 25 0.48 (2.95) 8.68 0.59 �6 6

Meaning 23 1.22 (2.79) 7.77 0.58 �2.5 5.5

MEANING AND ORTHOGRAPHY IN L2 FRENCH 57

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process the words (and their accent marks) more deeply and activated the

‘‘distinctiveness heuristic’’, as defined by Gallo et al. (2004).

This study was designed to look at vocabulary acquisition from the standpoint of

acquisition of orthography (specifically, accent marks in L2 French) and how thatprocess is affected by knowing or not knowing the meaning of the words. This was

achieved by asking two groups to copy a paragraph with accent mark-bearing words,

giving one group the chance to see images representing the target items and distracters.

There are, however, a few limitations to the study. First, participants were given

very limited exposure to the written forms of words and (in the meaning group) to the

images representing the words. In real learning situations, learners are able to rehearse

and return to new material. Second, the delayed posttests were administered only 1

week after treatment. Future, longitudinal research over the course of a semester, withseveral treatment and posttest sessions would be ideal to investigate the present

questions further.

Future research

Future research taking a more longitudinal approach to this question may shed more

light on the question of the effect of knowledge of meaning on acquisition of

orthography. For example, participants could complete a series of learning tasks over

the semester as well as a series of posttests, to approximate a more authentic learning

situation. Other future research might investigate the effect of typing versus writing by

hand (c.f. Gascoigne, 2006a; Gascoigne, 2006b; Gascoigne-Lally, 2000; Sturm, 2006,

2008, 2010; Sturm & Golato, 2005) on learning the meaning of a new word.

Final conclusions

Overall, there appears to be an advantage for learning the meanings of a word in

learning its orthography, in particular in the immediate ability to recognise correctly

accented versions of words. Specifically, learners are less likely to identify anincorrectly accented version of a word as correct if they have been exposed to the

meaning of the word. This contributes to understanding how learners whose L1 does

not contain a given such as accent marks process and orient to that feature in a L2.

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