Research in second language (L2) learning often considers one modality only during task completion. It is unclear if L2 performance is as accurate whatever the modality. L2 learning at school is characterized by a predominance of written materials. One might expect written L2 word recognition to be more accurate than spoken one. This modality effect could also depend on L2 proficiency and the presence of cognate items, closer orthographically than phonologically for most language pairs. Two experiments were conducted with 50 intermediate proficiency French–English bilinguals. Experiment 1 highlighted this modality effect on accuracy and a session effect reflecting a benefit from oral to written modality on latency. In Experiment 2, which included both cognate and non-cognate words, modality effect was even stronger for cognate words and cognate effect depended on modality. In both experiments, these effects depend on L2 proficiency. These findings are discussed according to bilingual word recognition models.

In two semantic priming experiments, this study examined how southern French speakers process the standard French [o] variant in closed syllables in comparison to their own variant [ɔ]. In Experiment 1, southern French speakers showed facilitation in the processing of the associated target word VIOLET whether the word prime mauve was pronounced by a standard French speaker ([mov]) or a southern French speaker ([mɔv]). More importantly, Experiment 1 has also revealed that words of type mauve, which are subject to dialectal variation, behave exactly in the same way as words of type gomme, which are pronounced with [ɔ] by both southern and standard French speakers, and for which we also found no modulation in the magnitude of the priming effect as a function of the dialect of the speaker. Experiment 2 replicated the priming effect found with the standard French variant [mov], and failed to show a priming effect with nonwords such as [mœv] that also differ from the southern French variant [mɔv] by only one phonetic feature. Our study thus provides further evidence for efficient processing of dialectal variants during spoken word recognition, even if these variants are not part of the speaker’s own productions.

Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present study examined the relationship between flexibility for adaptation in a second language (L2) and robustness of L2 phonolexical representations. Phonolexical encoding and phonetic flexibility for German learners of English were assessed by means of a lexical decision task containing nonwords with sound substitutions and a distributional learning task, respectively. Performance was analyzed for an easy (/i/-/ɪ/) and a difficult contrast (/ε/-/æ/, where /æ/ does not exist in German). Results showed that for /i/-/ɪ/ listeners were quite accurate in lexical decision, and distributional learning consistently triggered shifts in categorization. For /ε/-/æ/, lexical decision performance was poor but individual participants’ scores related to performance in distributional learning: the better learners were in their lexical decision, the smaller their categorization shift. This suggests that, for difficult L2 contrasts, rigidity at the phonetic level relates to better lexical performance.