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The present study examined the process of L2 orthographic learning in bilinguals with distant L1–L2 orthographies. Chinese–English bilinguals with various English proficiency levels were trained with novel L2 words during a reading task. In contrast to higher proficient learners, those with lower L2 proficiency exhibited increased effects of length, frequency, and lexicality across exposures and at-chance recognition of trained words. Importantly, an additional post-training task assessing the lexical integration of trained words evidenced the engagement in different L1–L2 reading strategies across different levels of L2 proficiency, hence suggesting the L1 holistic processing at the base of the effortful establishment of L2 orthographic representations shown by lower-proficient learners. Overall, these findings indicate the role of L2 proficiency in the influence that cross-linguistic variation exerts on L2 orthographic learning and highlight the need for English education programmes to tackle specific grapheme-to-phoneme skills in non-alphabetic target communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although several studies have found that the sublexical route of spelling has an effect on handwriting movements, the ability of lexical variables to modulate peripheral processes during writing is less clear. This study addresses the hypothesis that word frequency affects writing durations only during writing acquisition, and that at some point of development, the handwriting system becomes a relatively autonomous system unaffected by lexical variables. Spanish children attending Grades 2, 4, and 6 performed a spelling-to-dictation and a copy task in which word frequency was manipulated. Results revealed that written latencies decreased with age, especially between Grades 2 and 4, and that writing durations decreased between these two groups. All these measures were longer during copying but the effect of task on written latencies and in-air pen trajectories was smaller for older children. Crucially, a significant word frequency effect on writing durations was observed only in Grade 2. This effect was marginally significant in Grade 4 and disappeared in Grade 6. However, all groups showed a similar effect of word frequency on written latencies. These findings suggest that lexical processes impact peripheral processes during writing acquisition and that this influence diminishes to eventually disappear at some point in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]