Cognate beginnings to bilingual lexical acquisition

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that cognateness boosts bilingual lexical acquisition. This study proposes an account in which language co-activation accelerates accumulation of word-learning instances across languages. This account predicts a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language than in the higher-exposure language, as the former receive co-activation from their translations more frequently. Bayesian Item Response Theory was used to model acquisition trajectories for 604 Catalan-Spanish translations from a dataset of 366 12-32 month-old bilinguals (M = 22.23 months, 175 female, mainly White, collected 2020-2022). Results show a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language (d =.276), than for words in the higher-exposure language (d =.022), supporting a language exposure-moderated account for the effect of cognateness on lexical acquisition.

This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation and State Research Agency (Project PID2021-123416NB-I00 financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (ES/S010947/1, UK). GGC was supported by an FPI research contract (PRE2019-088165). DAV was supported by the European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant (765556) and partially supported by Portuguese national funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology, under project UIDB/00214/2020, awarded to the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon. IC was supported by the Investigo program funded by the European Union's NextGenerationEU (NGEU) recovery plan. NSG was supported by an ICREA Academia 2019 award from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and by the project 2021 SGR 00911 financed by the Catalan Generalitat AGAUR. We are grateful to Chiara Santolin, Ege E. Özer, and the rest of the Speech Acquisition and Perception research group, to Alicia Franco-Martínez and Cristina Rodríguez-Prada, and Erika Hoff, James S. Magnuson and Luca Bonatti for their helpful feedback. We thank Xavier Mayoral, Silvia Blanch, and Cristina Cuadrado for their technical support, and Katia Pistrin for their efforts in recruiting infants. We also thank all families and infants who participated in the experiments and kindly shared their time during the hard times of the pandemic.