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Article published In:
Processing in Bilingual Children
Edited by Chantal van Dijk, Jasmijn E. Bosch and Sharon Unsworth
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:4] 2024
► pp. 577–608

Cognate facilitation in single- and dual-language contexts in bilingual children’s word processing

ORCID logo | Radboud University
ORCID logo | Radboud University
ORCID logo | Radboud University
ORCID logo | Radboud University

We examined the extent to which cognate facilitation effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s production and comprehension and how these were modulated by language dominance and language context. Bilingual Dutch-German children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to German-dominant, performed picture naming and auditory lexical decision tasks in single-language and dual-language contexts. Language context was manipulated with respect to the language of communication (with the experimenter and in instructional videos) and by means of proficiency tasks. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both production and comprehension and interacted with both dominance and context. In a single-language context, stronger cognate facilitation effects were found for picture naming in children’s less dominant language, in line with previous studies on individual differences in lexical activation. In the dual-language context, this pattern was reversed, suggesting inhibition of the dominant language at the decision level. Similar effects were observed in lexical decision. These findings provide evidence for an integrated bilingual lexicon in simultaneous bilingual children and shed more light on the complex interplay between lexicon-internal and lexicon-external factors modulating the extent of lexical cross-linguistic influence more generally.

Keywords: simultaneous bilingual children, cross-linguistic influence, cognates, production, comprehension
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The bilingual lexicon
    • 1.2Language dominance
    • 1.3Language context
    • 1.4Present study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
      • 2.2.1Picture naming
      • 2.2.2Lexical decision
      • 2.2.3Background tasks
      • 2.2.4Overlap between tasks
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Scoring
    • 2.5Analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Data exclusion
      • 3.1.1Picture naming
      • 3.1.2Lexical decision
    • 3.2Picture naming results
    • 3.3Lexical decision results
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Cognate facilitation
    • 4.2Language dominance
    • 4.3Language context
    • 4.4Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Data availability statement
  • Competing interests declaration
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 20 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.23009.kou
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