Vol.:(0123456789) Reading and Writing https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-09941-y 1 3 How do L2 learners and L1 writers difer in their reliance on working memory during the formulation subprocess? Cecilia Gunnarsson‑Largy 1  · Nathalie Dherbey 2  · Pierre Largy 1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract L1 and L2 writers attend to diferent aspects of the formulation subprocess of writ- ing. L2 writers devote more time and attention to low-level aspects such as gram- mar correction and spelling (Barbier 1998; Fagan and Hayden 1988; Whalen and Ménard 1995), leading to better spelling performances than L1 writers (Gunnarsson- Largy 2013). In deep-orthography languages such as French or English, L1 writers retrieve a phonological form of the word and then tend to automatically transcribe the most frequent corresponding orthographic form, whereas L2 writers seem to directly retrieve the exact orthographic form. For L2 writers, the visuo-orthographic form of the word therefore seems to prevail over the phonological one. Accordingly, we hypothesized that L1 and L2 writers rely diferently on working memory (WM). To test this hypothesis, we designed an experiment where two groups (Levels B1 and C1) of instructed L2 French learners and an L1 French control group wrote dictated sentences, with compulsory negation marking in an ambiguous phonologi- cal context. While writing, they performed a concurrent task that induced a cogni- tive load on either phonological or visual WM, in order to identify the nature of the form maintained in WM during semantic checking. Results indicated that L2 French learners gradually move from a visual to a more phonological form of retrieval. Keywords Formulation subprocess · L2 spelling · Word form retrieval · Visual WM · Phonological WM * Cecilia Gunnarsson-Largy gunnars@univ-tlse2.fr 1 URI Octogone-Lordat (EA4156), Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, Université de Toulouse, 5 allées Antonio Machado, 31058 Toulouse Cedex 9, France 2 Institut de plurilinguisme, rue de Morat, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland