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

J Child Lang. 2023 Dec 13:1-20. doi: 10.1017/S0305000923000648. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTBilinguals 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.PMID:38087835 | DOI:10.1017/S0305000923000648
Source: Journal of Child Language - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research