Spelling patterns of German 4th graders in French vowels: Insights into spelling solutions within and across two alphabetic writing systems

Cross-language transfer in vowel spelling is difficult to detect because the relation between a vowel and its grapheme is often ambiguous within a writing system and the interpretation of transfer complex. This study examined French spelling patterns of German fourth graders with French as Foreign language cross-linguistically by applying a fine-grained measure to the differences in spelling, tested with a dictation. The study differentiated between phonologically and graphematically joint vs. unshared vowel graphemes in French and German and the contribution of each category to transfer. Instead of testing orthographic knowledge as in applying the orthographic norm correctly, it used the model of the ‘graphematic solution space’ [Neef, M. (2015). Writing systems as modular objects: Proposals for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics, 1(1), 708–721.] that takes into account spelling that is graphematically licensed within the involved writing system. The analysis distinguished between poor and good German spellers to get insights on the relation of the pupils’ competence in the German and French spelling. Results showed an influence of the phonological and graphematic overlap in the spelling patterns, but also inconsistencies with both writing systems. The findings challenge statistical learning in multilingual contexts as the produced graphotactic patterns are rather French-like than French.