Cognate identification methods: Impacts on the cognate advantage in adult and child Spanish-English bilinguals

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine whether four different cognate identification methods resulted in notably different classifications of cognate status for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition (PPVT-III) test items and to investigate whether differences across criteria would impact findings of cognate effects in adult and preschool-aged Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Methodology: We compared four cognate identification methods: an objective criterion based on phonological overlap; two subjective criteria based on a translation elicitation task; and a hybrid criterion integrating objective and subjective standards. We then used each criterion to investigate cognate effects on the PPVT-III in 26 adult and 73 child Spanish-English bilinguals. Data and analysis: The test items identified as cognates by each criterion were compared (Experiment 1). Then, cognate advantage magnitudes, cognate accuracy rates, non-cognate accuracy rates, and number of individuals demonstrating the cognate advantage were investigated in both adult (Experiment 2) and child bilinguals (Experiment 3). Conclusions: Objective and subjective cognate identification methods were found to select notably different subsets of test items as cognates. Further, the methods led to differences in cognate effects, as well as in cognate and non-cognate accuracy rates, for both child and adult bilinguals. Originality: Although the cognate advantage has been widely studied in adult bilinguals, research on the cognate advantage in child bilinguals is limited and methods of identifying cognates are inconsistent across studies. The present study provides information about cognate effects in a young population and is the first comparison of objective and subjective approaches to cognate identification. Implications: This study extends previous work on cognate word processing in both child and adult bilinguals. Further, results offer an evaluation of methodologies that are critical for investigating the cognate advantage. This both facilitates interpretation of previous findings and can be used to guide methodological decisions in future research.

Using the peabody picture vocabulary test in L2 children and adolescents: effects of L1

“…Our second hypothesis was that phonological similarity between the English words and their Dutch translations would positively influence pupils scores on the PPVT-4, as a cognate effect had already been shown for Spanish children (Potapova, Blumenfeld, and Pruitt-Lord 2016). Moreover, we expected that this effect would be larger for older pupils, as previous research had shown that older Dutch-Frisian bilingual children are better at recognising overlap between words in two languages than younger children (Bosma et al 2016).…”

“…The researchers mentioned that this may have helped monolingual children with word association and recognition. Previous research has also shown that the PPVT-3 and PPVT-4 contain Spanish-English cognates (Potapova, Blumenfeld, and Pruitt-Lord 2016;Wood and Pena 2015), and that Spanish-English bilingual children perform better on cognates than on non-cognates (Potapova, Blumenfeld, and Pruitt-Lord 2016). Furthermore, a recent study with adult L2 learners showed that the PPVT-4 contains more French-English than Polish-English cognates, and hence French L1 speakers obtained higher scores on the PPVT-4 than Polish L1 speakers (Leśniewska, Pichette, and Béland 2018).…”

“…'false friends') are not included in this study. It is known that meaning and form overlap helps children derive the meaning of a word (Pérez, Peña, and Bedore 2010;Potapova, Blumenfeld, and Pruitt-Lord 2016), even when children have limited exposure to the L2 (Bosma et al 2016). Children have also been found to process cognates faster than non-cognates (Brenders, van Hell, and Dijkstra 2011;Poarch and van Hell 2012a).…”

“…This allowed us to examine whether the two measures correlate with each other (cf. Potapova, Blumenfeld, and Pruitt-Lord 2016). Participants were 25 native speakers of Dutch (M age = 24.4; SD age = 4.8).…”

Predictors of Successful Learning in Multilingual Older Adults Acquiring a Majority Language

“…Consistently, Bartolotti and Marian (2016) taught fluent speakers of English and German a novel artificial language that had overlap with both their L1 and L2, and found that both previously learned languages contributed to success with the novel language. Finally, in proficient speakers, structurally similar aspects of languages continue to provide cross-linguistic scaffolding for processing in both bilingual contexts (e.g., Costa et al, 2005;Schoonbaert et al, 2007;Blumenfeld et al, 2016a;Potapova et al, 2016) and multilingual contexts (e.g., Lemhöfer et al, 2004 been well established in young adults that previously known languages provide an experiential baseline that can facilitate the acquisition of novel languages, both through direct transfer of knowledge and through potential honing of cognitive skills that underlie learning (e.g., Hirosh and Degani, 2017). Consistently with predictions that older adults may rely heavily on previous knowledge, Marcotte and Ansaldo (2014) found in their word-level training study, teaching Spanish words to younger and older French monolinguals, that older learners had more robust cognate effects than the younger learners.…”