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The illusory benefit of cognates: Lexical facilitation followed by sublexical interference in a word typing task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2018

LAURA M. MUSCALU  and
PATRICIA A. SMILEY
LAURA M. MUSCALU*
Affiliation:
Cornell University Ithaca College
PATRICIA A. SMILEY
Affiliation:
Pomona College
*
Address for correspondence: Laura Muscalu, Cornell University, College of Human Ecology, 335 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853USAmuscalu.laura@gmail.com
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Abstract

Cognate facilitation and cognate interference in word production have been elicited separately, in different paradigms. In our experiment, we created conditions for facilitation and interference to occur sequentially, and identified the levels at which the two processes manifested. Bilinguals translated cognates and noncognates from L2 to L1 and typed the translations. Response-onset latencies were shorter for cognates (cognate-facilitation) but execution latencies were longer, and cross-language orthographic errors were more frequent for cognates than for noncognates (cognate-interference). Facilitation at onset followed by interference during word execution suggests that the language-selection mechanism operated efficiently at the lexical level but inefficiently at the sublexical level. It also suggests that language selection is not an event with irreversible outcome, but selection at one level may not guarantee language-selectivity at subsequent levels. We propose that a model of bilingual language production that specifies multiple language-selection processes at multiple loci of selection can accommodate this phenomenon.

Keywords

bilingual language processingcognatesorthographic interferencelanguage-selection mechanism
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , August 2019 , pp. 848 - 865
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*We wish to acknowledge Deborah Burke for astute comments on the manuscript, Judith Kroll for consultation on the research, and Jasmin Sadat and the anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback. We also are indebted to the participants who offered their time and enthusiasm for the project.

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