Second Language Research 1–26 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0267658316684905 journals.sagepub.com/home/slr second language research L1 English / L2 Spanish: Orthography–phonology activation without contrasts Christine Shea University of Iowa, USA Abstract We consider how orthography activates sounds that are in a noncontrastive relationship in the second language (L2) and for which only one variant exists in the first language (L1). Participants were L1 English / L2 Spanish and native Spanish listeners. Intervocalically, Spanish graphemes ‘b d g’ correspond phonetically to stops and approximants (e.g. lobo ‘wolf’, lo[β]o), and in English they correspond only to stops. In Experiment 1, native and L2 Spanish listeners completed cross-modal (written–auditory) and within modal (auditory) priming tasks. Prime- target pairs were counterbalanced for phonetic variant. The results for L2 listeners in the cross-modal condition showed a significant interaction between variant and mode. Experiment 2 used long-term repetition priming to tap into longer-term representations and test whether L1 orthography is activated even when it is not strictly necessary to complete the task. Results for L2 speakers showed priming by both phonetic variants while for native listeners, only approximants showed a priming effect. Keywords adult second language acquisition, cross-modal priming, orthography, phonology, Spanish I Introduction There is considerable evidence that learning to read restructures phonological represen- tations, strongly influenced by the close connections between orthography and phonol- ogy (Castles et al., 2011). Literate individuals have been shown to demonstrate sharper categorical perception boundaries than nonliterate individuals (Serniclaes et al., 2005), and literacy development (even in adulthood) has been shown to refine cortical organiza- tion (Dehaene et al., 2010). In children, phonological awareness improves in tandem Corresponding author: Christine Shea, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA Email: christine-shea@uiowa.edu 684905SLR 0 0 10.1177/0267658316684905Second Language ResearchShea research-article 2017 Original Article