In languages that use diacritical marks to distinguish letters, do native speakers regard them as related or as entirely different letters?
I hope this question is appropriate here. As a native English speaker raised on the English/American alphabet, I will always see n and ñ, c and č, i and ı, etc as variants of the same letter. Do native speakers of Spanish, Czech, Turkish etc. see them the same way--are they grouped together in their mental map of the alphabet--or are they as different as t and d are for me?
For example, if English had a diacritical mark for "voiced," d could be written as t‵ or whatever I know from reading the r/EnglishLearning that non-native speakers sometimes struggle with understanding the difference. But until I learned about voicing, it never occurred to me that the two letters were related any more than t and r are. I understand that ñ is formally a separate letter for alphabetization purposes etc., but I was wondering if native Spanish speakers saw it as like "n plus" or not like n at all.