Phoneme length and type affect L1 and L2 children’s reading process in a transparent orthography: evidence from eye tracking

Evidence suggests that auditory perception of Finnish phoneme-length contrasts is difficult when such contrasts are irrelevant in one's first language (L1). The effects of phoneme length (long/short) and type (stop consonant/vowel) on reading processes were studied in monolingual Finnish and multilingual children representing 13 L1 languages. Thirty native L1 Finnish (16 female, 14 male) and 30 sequentially multilingual children (16 female, 14 male) with L2 Finnish participated in an eye-tracking experiment at age 9–10 years. The children read 64 carrier sentences containing embedded target words manipulated across eight conditions: short/geminate stop consonants and short/long vowels in short and long words. Technical reading skill was evaluated using a standardized Finnish reading test. Auditory perception of phoneme length was not assessed. Target words containing long phonemes or stop consonants slowed reading in L2 children compared with L1 children and in technically weak readers in both groups. The effect was particularly pronounced for geminate stop consonants. However, in a likely underpowered additional analysis restricted to the L2 group, reading skill differences disappeared when the prevalence of phoneme-length contrasts in participants' L1s was taken into account. This study highlights challenges that sequentially multilingual children and children with weak reading skills face in processing phoneme-length contrasts during technical reading in Finnish, a language with transparent orthography. The findings corroborate earlier research linking auditory perception of phoneme-length contrasts to reading skills in these populations.