Identical Cognates Research Articles

Production of lexical stress by Spanish speakers of English as a second language and its effect on perceptual judgments of intelligibility and accentedness

Acoustic analyses of recordings of read speech were used to compare the production of lexical stress in multisyllabic words by Spanish ESL (English as a Second Language) speakers to that of native English speakers. The participants read short sentences containing multi-syllabic target words for which syllable duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency in the pronunciations of stressed and unstressed syllables were compared. Target words were equally divided based on syllable count, the syllable that should receive lexical stress based on native English pronunciation, and Spanish/English cognate status. Both orthographically identical cognates (e.g., radio) and orthographically non-identical cognates (e.g., necessary/necesario) were included. Average values of syllable duration, intensity and fundamental frequency were recorded across the speaker groups, and effects of cognate status on production were noted. Target words pronounced by the native speakers (to avoid differing segmental factors) were then resynthesized using the PSOLA algorithm to simulate the acoustic patterns of the ESL speakers. Native English listeners were asked to rate a set of stimuli embedded in a carrier phrase for intelligibility and accentedness. Results of the listening tasks suggest that variations in the acoustic properties under investigation may impact a listeners perception of speech intelligibility and accentedness.

Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals.

Bilingual Lexical Representation: The Status of Spanish-English Cognates

Two experiments were conducted to determine the functional status of cognates. Two hypotheses were considered. According to the first hypothesis, language is a critical feature governing lexical organization, and cognates may therefore be equated with morphologically unrelated translations. According to a second hypothesis, however, language is not a critical feature governing lexical organization. Instead, the boundaries between perceptual categories are determined by morphological considerations, and cognates may therefore be equated with intra-lingual variations such as inflections and derivations. If the first hypothesis is correct, cognate performance should follow that observed for translations, but if the second hypothesis is correct, cognate performance should follow that observed for inflections and derivations. The experiments used different procedures in order to discount taskspecific explanations. The first experiment involved repetition priming in a lexical decision task, and emphasis was placed on relative priming; that is, on the amount of facilitation which occurs when, for example, OBEDIENCIA primes OBEDIENCE, expressed as a fraction of the amount of facilitation that occurs when the same word is presented on each occasion (i.e., when OBEDIENCE is used to prime OBEDIENCE). The second experiment tested memory for language. Four types of cognates were tested. These were: orthographically identical cognates, regular cognates with cion/tion substitution, regular cognates with dad/ty substitution, and irregularly derived cognates. The results were unequivocal. The priming values observed previously for cognates were qualitatively and quantitatively similar to those observed for inflections and derivations, and this classification was confirmed in the second experiment, involving memory for language. The results are consistent with the general proposition that morphology rather than language governs the boundaries between perceptual categories, and a number of specific explanations are reviewed.

1464 Identical Cognates in English and Spanish

T HE following list was gathered* for use in teaching students of Spanish to visualize written Spanish words from hearing the spoken forms. While any Spanish word will serve this purpose, identical cognates are ideal because students take a keen interest in guessing the English cognate. In practice, the class is told that if the word is correctly visualized, an English word will result. The effect is usually one of lively competition to see who can guess it first. Though it is not the fashion at present to stress written forms, an exercise of this sort is psychologically valid. In memory work, the more muscles that can be brought into play, the more prompt and accurate the recollection will be. A word that is mentally visualized as well as mentally heard is twice as likely to be retained as a word that is hitched to our hearing apparatus only. And since nowadays most of our new vocabulary is picked up by the eye, and above all since Spanish writing is so rational as alphabetic systems go, it is worth while to engage visual memory in Spanish vocabulary-building. The cognates will doubtless prove useful in other ways, but it should be borne in mind that no attempt is made here to compile an exhaustive list of identical spellings-as indeed little profit would result in doing so, since new borrowings and coinages, especially in the sciences, occur daily. The following limitations apply: (1) Virtually no loan words were included unless their pronunciation conformed to the normal values of Spanish symbols; thus words such as cottage and lunch, and all words using the letter w (but not k), were omitted. (2) Though most of the common technical terms except recent neologisms were taken in, some will be found lacking. (3) No cognates of varying parts of speech (except some interchange between nouns and adjectives) were included; thus accidental identity through verbal desinence, such as interlinear (English adjective-suffix, Spanish verb-suffix), or freaks which are ultimately cognates, such as once, were not recognized, although the type mayor (English noun, Spanish adjective) was included. If singularizing or pluralizing re-