The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access.

Abstract

Do nonselected lexical nodes activate their phonological information? Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were asked to name (a) pictures whose names are cognates in the 2 languages (words that are phonologically similar in the 2 languages) and (b) pictures whose names are noncognates in the 2 languages, if nonselected lexical nodes are phonologically encoded, naming latencies should be shorter for cognate words, and because the cognate status of words is only meaningful for bilingual speakers, this difference should disappear when testing monolingual speakers. The results of Experiment 1 fully supported these predictions. In Experiment 2, the difference between cognate and noncognate words was larger when naming in the nondominant language than when naming in the dominant language. The results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as providing support to cascaded activation models of lexical access. Following a seminal proposal by Garrett (1975Garrett ( , 1976, current models of speech production assume that lexical access occurs in two main "stages" (e.g.

Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

“…In Experiment 1, we replicated the cognate facilitation effect, which several studies have obtained using various tasks, bilinguals, languages and stimuli (e.g., Costa et al, 2000;De Groot et al, 1994;Dijkstra et al, 1999;Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002). Using a L2 lexical decision task with word targets presented in isolation, we found that cognates are recognized faster (and more accurately) than control words.…”

“…Fourth, the study by Schwartz and Kroll (2006) used word naming, which also comprises a production component. Because the locus of the obtained cognate facilitation effect may also be situated in this production phase (as indicated by cognate effects in other production tasks, such as picture naming, e.g., Costa et al, 2000), the present study extends their findings for word production to pure visual word recognition (lexical decision, eyetracking). This allows to attribute any cognate facilitation effect more directly to the lexical access process.…”

“…They also reported a L2 cognate facilitation effect for cognate words appearing in a sentence context, using word naming, which also entails a production component. Because earlier production studies without a word recognition phase (e.g., picture naming, Costa et al, 2000) have also reported cognate effects, this production component may also have caused the cognate effect of Schwartz and Kroll. Therefore, the present study constitutes an important extension of their findings to pure word recognition (lexical decision, eyetracking).…”

Repetition Priming in Picture Naming and Translation Depends on Shared Processes and Their Difficulty: Evidence From Spanish-English Bilinguals.

“…Therefore, we must consider the possibility that processes that are incidental to naming in the study language but necessary for naming in the test language may also contribute to priming. If the nontarget language is incidentally activated in the prime phase, as suggested by Costa et al (1999Costa et al ( , 2000, and this activation impacts processing at test, the set of predictions is different. In between-language conditions, not only would the prime phase provide practice of picture-identification processes, but also practice of some word-retrieval processes in the nontarget language, which becomes the target response language in the test phase.…”

Activation cascading in sign production.

“…Furthermore, studies with bilinguals have shown that multiple words are simultaneously activated not only in the language in use but also in the other language (Colomé & Miozzo, 2009;Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2000). Moreover, full cascading proved essential to successfully reproduce a variety of empirical results with computational models of spoken word production (e.g., Chen & Mirman, 2012;Dell & O'Seaghdha, 1992;Oppenheim, Dell, & Schwartz, 2010).…”