Abstract
The present study examines cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of the Catalan back mid-vowel contrast (/o/-/ɔ/) by 24 early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Participants completed a picture-naming task and a forced-choice lexical decision task in which they were presented with either words (e.g., /bɔsk/ “forest”) or non-words based on real words, but with the alternate mid-vowel pair in stressed position (*/bosk/). The same cognate and non-cognate lexical items were included in the production and lexical decision experiments. The results indicate that even though these early bilinguals maintained the back mid-vowel contrast in their productions, they had great difficulties identifying non-words and real words based on the identity of the Catalan mid-vowel. The analyses revealed language dominance and cognate effects: Spanish-dominants exhibited higher error rates than Catalan-dominants, and production and lexical decision accuracy were also affected by cognate status. The present study contributes to the discussion of the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant sound systems, and proposes that exemplar theoretic approaches can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals.
Highlights
A bilingual/multilingual individual must acquire two or more sound systems with differing sets of segments
The dataset was submitted to a mixed-model ANOVA with language dominance (Spanishdominant, Catalan-dominant) as between-subjects factor, vowel (/o/, / /), and cognate status as withinsubjects factors, and subject as the random term
The pattern showed that cognates increased lexical decision accuracy in comparison with non-cognates. Taken together these results suggest that congruent cognates increased the lexical decision accuracy, facilitating lexical access, whereas incongruent cognates increased cross-linguistic interference between the mid-vowel categories, causing a higher error rate in the lexical recognition process
Summary
A bilingual/multilingual individual must acquire two or more sound systems with differing sets of segments. Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon need to be able to establish lexical representations in their dominant and non-dominant language that encode languagespecific phonemic contrasts Following this assumption, recent studies have explored the dimension of the phonology/lexicon interface as opposed to experimental paradigms that focus exclusively on the categorization of phones without necessarily testing their linguistic function. Recent studies have explored the dimension of the phonology/lexicon interface as opposed to experimental paradigms that focus exclusively on the categorization of phones without necessarily testing their linguistic function This line of research seeks to determine how bilingual speakers encode words in their mental lexicon, how bilinguals resolve an increase in lexical competition due to having phonological representations of words in two different languages, and the impact of non-robust phonological representations with regard to bilingual lexical access (Weber and Cutler, 2004; Cutler et al, 2006; Escudero et al, 2008; Hayes-Harb and Masuda, 2008; Darcy et al, 2012; Amengual, 2015). Given that many language pairs have lexical items that share form and meaning, these cognate words are likely to have a special status for bilinguals
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
