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Cognates are advantaged over non-cognates in early bilingual expressive vocabulary development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2023

Lori MITCHELL ,
Rachel Ka-Ying TSUI Open the ORCID record for Rachel Ka-Ying TSUI [Opens in a new window]  and
Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN Open the ORCID record for Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN [Opens in a new window]
Lori MITCHELL
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Rachel Ka-Ying TSUI*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
*
Corresponding author: Rachel Ka-Ying Tsui; Email: rachelkytsui@gmail.com
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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. Longitudinal expressive vocabulary data were 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). Children produced a greater proportion of cognates than non-cognates, and the interval between producing a word and its translation equivalent was about 10–15 days shorter for cognates than for non-cognates. The findings suggest that cognate learning is facilitated in early bilingual vocabulary development, such that phonological overlap supports bilinguals in learning phonologically similar words across their two languages.

Keywords

bilingual infantscognatestranslation equivalentsphonological similarityexpressive vocabulary

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Type
Article
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Journal of Child Language , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , May 2024 , pp. 596 - 615
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© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article was originally published with errors in the affiliations of two authors. This has now been corrected and an erratum published at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000924000059.

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