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ABSTRACT: Purpose: Cognates are words that share meaning and form, where the translation-equivalent pairs between languages are phonologically similar (e.g., baby-bebé and telephone-teléfono). Noncognates are word pairs that share meaning but not form (e.g., bear-oso). The literature strongly establishes a cognate advantage with bilingual adults, although evidence for younger bilinguals is still emerging. This study investigated young Spanish-speaking English language learners' (ELLs') picture naming of cognates and noncognates.
Method: Thirty-one Spanish-speaking ELL children completed a picture-naming task in English and in Spanish, in a counterbalanced order, to compare performance on cognates and noncognates. Data analysis using a repeated measures analysis of variance compared cognate and noncognate accuracy in English and Spanish. The number of translation-equivalent pairs between cognates and noncognates (i.e., named in both languages) was also compared.
Results: Young ELL children demonstrated higher naming accuracy on phonologically similar cognates than on phonologically dissimilar noncognates, which is similar to the cognate advantage found with bilingual adults and with young bilingual children on receptive tasks. Additionally, more translation-equivalent pairs were found with cognates than with noncognates.
Conclusion: Findings suggest that the cognate status of words should be considered for assessment practices and clinical decision making. Future research should examine additional cognate measures and individual factors that influence cognate facilitation.
KEY WORDS: bilingualism, assessment, phonology, language
In speech-language pathology, the term cognate has more than one meaning; for this bilingual investigation, the definition of interest classifies cognates as words with shared meaning and linguistic similarity across languages (Harley, 2008). An example in English and Spanish is the cognate word pair baby-bebé, which shares the concept of an "infant" as well as linguistic similarity in phonology (i.e., sounds produced), orthography (i.e., spelling patterns), and morphology (i.e., word structure).
In the average educated adult's vocabulary, English and Spanish share approximately 10,000 to 15,000 cognates, estimated as one-third to one-half of one's vocabulary (Thomas, Nash, Thomas, & Richmond, 2005). In contrast, noncognates share meaning, but the translation pairs share less linguistic similarity (e.g., bear-oso), and false cognates share lexical similarity but have different semantic meanings (e.g., embarrassed-embarazada, in Spanish means pregnant).
Only 4.5% of the 161,163 American SpeechLanguage-Hearing Association (ASHA) members reported meeting the definition of being bilingual (ASHA, 2014), but at least 60% of school speechlanguage pathologists (SLPs)...