The cognate continuum

Abstract

Cognates, words that are similar in form and meaning across two languages, form compelling test cases for bilingual access and representation. Overwhelmingly, cognate pairs are subjectively selected in a categorical either- or manner, often with criteria and modality unspecified. Yet the few studies that take a more nuanced approach, selecting cognate pairs along a continuum of overlap, show interesting, albeit somewhat divergent results. This study compares three measures that quantify cognateness continuously to obtain modality-specific cognate scores for the same set of Norwegian-English word-translation pairs: (1) Researcher Intuitions – bilingual researchers rate the degree of overlap between the paired words, (2) Levenshtein Distance – an algorithm that computes overlap between word pairs, and (3) Translation Elicitation – English-speaking monolinguals guess what Norwegian words mean. Results demonstrate that cognateness can be ranked on a continuum and reveal measure and modality-specific effects. Orthographic presentation yields higher cognateness status than auditory presentation overall. Though all three measures intercorrelated moderately to highly, Researcher Intuitions demonstrated a bimodal distribution, yielding scores on the high and low end of the spectrum, consistent with the common categorical approach in the field. Levenshtein Distance would be preferred for fine-grained distinctions along the continuum of form overlap.