The lifespan development of cognate guessing skills in an unknown related language

Abstract

This study investigates the lifespan development of the ability to correctly guess the meaning of foreign-language words with known translationequivalent cognates. It also aims to identify the cognitive and linguistic factors driving this development. To this end, 159 German-speaking Swiss participants aged 10 to 86 were asked to translate 45 written and 45 spoken isolated Swedish words with German, English or French cognates. In addition, they were administered an English language test, a German vocabulary test as well as fluid intelligence and working memory tests. Cognate guessing skills were found to improve into young adulthood, but whereas they show additional increases in the written modality throughout adulthood, they start to decrease from age 50 onwards for spoken stimuli. Congruently with these findings, L1 vocabulary knowledge is a stronger predictor of written cognate guessing success, whereas fluid intelligence is the most important predictor in the spoken modality. Raw data and computer code used for the analyses are freely available online.

Interactions between formal distance and participant-related variables in receptive multilingualism

“…The data analyzed in this paper stem from a cross-sectional lifespan study on receptive multilingualism (Vanhove 2014;Vanhove et al 2015a) in which 159 German-speaking Swiss participants aged ten to 86 were asked to translate 50 written and 50 spoken Swedish words into German. Ninety of the words had translation-equivalent cognates in German and/or the foreign languages common to most participants, viz.…”

“…For want of space, this Method section only discusses the tasks that are directly relevant to this contribution. For additional details on the exact procedures as well as a list of the stimuli used and their cognates, we refer to Vanhove (2014) and Vanhove and Berthele (2015a). Similarly, the cross-sectional aspects of the data, including the independent effect of age as well as its correlations and interactions with the variables considered in this paper, are amply discussed in the publications cited.…”

“…With respect to (b), Vanhove and Berthele (2015a) found that participants who can deal more flexibly with abstract, non-linguistic patterns ('fluid intelligence') are better at guessing the meaning of spoken Lx cognates. Here, it can be expected that participants who are better at dealing flexibly with abstract patterns can apply those skills to receptive multilingualism contexts so that formal discrepancies between Lx stimuli and their L1 (L2, ..., Ln) cognates would not affect them as much.…”

“…With respect to (a), findings by Berthele (2008Berthele ( , 2011 and Vanhove and Berthele (2015a) suggest that participants with larger linguistic repertoires (including more as well as more varied L1 experience) are better at receptive multilingualism and Lx word comprehension. Their finding that inter-individual differences, even in L1 vocabulary knowledge, predict receptive multilingualism success ties in with an observation that Teleman (1981) made in a Scandinavian setting: infrequent L1 lexemes (e. g., Swedish begynna instead of the more common börja 'to start') sometimes correspond to unmarked Lx forms (Norwegian begynne).…”

“…In sum, the expectation is not only that higher levels of linguistic experience and fluid intelligence are associated with an overall better performance in Lx cognate guessing (see Vanhove et al 2015a), but also that participants with higher levels of linguistic experience and fluid intelligence depend to a lesser degree on formal matches when guessing the meaning of Lx cognates (i. e., the slope linking formal distance and cognate guessing success should be less steep in these participants). It is the latter prediction that this paper addresses.…”