Cognates are advantaged over non-cognates in early bilingual expressive vocabulary development
L. Mitchell, R. K.-Y. Tsui, & K. Byers-Heinlein
May 2024
Journal of Child Language
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Do bilingual infants learn similar-sounding cross-language words like banana-banane more rapidly than dog-chien? Our results show that the ease with which bilingual infants build their two lexicons could be impacted by how similar words in their two languages are, and words with the largest phonological overlap may be the most advantaged in early bilingual vocabulary acquisition.
What is it about:
Abstract:
Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g., banana—banane) are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-cognates. The present study explored if there is such an advantage for cognate production in bilinguals’ early vocabulary development. Using longitudinal expressive vocabulary data collected from 47 English–French bilinguals starting at 16–20 months up to 27 months (a total of 219 monthly administrations in both English and French), results showed that overall children produced a greater proportion of cognates than non-cognates on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. The findings suggest that cognate learning is facilitated in early bilingual vocabulary development. Just as in monolinguals, these results suggest that phonological overlap supports bilingual language acquisition.
Cite:
@article{mitchell_etal_2024,
title = {Cognates are advantaged over non-cognates in early bilingual expressive vocabulary development},
author = {Mitchell, Lori and Tsui, Rachel Ka-Ying and Byers-Heinlein, Krista},
journal = {Journal of Child Language},
year = 2024,
volume = 51(3),
pages={596 - 615},
DOI={10.1017/S0305000923000648}
}