Studi sull'interfaccia tra la rappresentazione fonologica e la rappresentazione ortografica

The research project aims at investigating the interface between the orthographic knowledge and the phonological competence among Italian L1 speakers. Since some time, it has been found that speakers possessing an alphabetic literacy conceptualize the native lexicon on the base of graphemic units as well as phonological ones, the phonemes. The scientific literature has often recognized the influence of orthography in speech perception (orthographic consistency effect), but lacks parallel studies concerning speech production. Through three case studies (orthographically activated metaphony in Italian as spoken in Sardinia, the pattern of the article selection before the glide /w/ and the place assimilation of /n/ before glide /w/ in external sandhi, all of them analysed as partly dependent on the orthographic structure), the project aims at providing further knowledge about the interface between orthography and phonology and the processes involved during speech production in Italian. For what concerns the speech production, according to the results of two phonetic and phonological analyses and a distributional one, we propose that the processing of spoken language is largely based upon the orthographic, as well as phonological, interpretation of the lexicon among literate speakers. From another point of view, we present original arguments concerning the study of some phonetic and phonological phenomena by taking into account the orthographic form too along with the phonological representation. The theoretical framework we make reference to interprets the orthographic influence on phonology in terms of a cognitive restructuring caused by the knowledge of the written language and the linguospecific orthographic rules. Our results corroborate current considerations within psycholinguistic field on the restructuring of the mental lexicon and hence on the phonological processing which, once alphabetic literacy is acquired, appears to be influenced by the orthographic structure.