Bultena, S. 1 , Dijkstra, T. 1 & Van Hell, J. 2, 3
1 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Radboud University. Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
2 Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University. University Park, PA, USA.
3 Behavioural Science Institute. Radboud University. Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Switching between languages in production or recognition is associated with a measurable cost. Yet, numerous studies have shown that bilinguals access lexical representations from both languages in parallel. This is especially clear for cognates, which are translation equivalents with form-overlap, such as the Dutch-English word FILM. Cognates co-activate representations in two languages and therefore provide an interesting test ground for language switching. According to Clyne’s (2003) trigger hypothesis, cognates may facilitate codeswitching in the speech of habitual codeswitchers. This is corroborated by recent evidence that noun cognates reduce switch costs in reading. We examined the trigger hypothesis using an unexplored word class, verb cognates, and studied how verb cognates affect language switching in sentences. In a shadowing task, Dutch-English bilinguals were presented with sentences that could start in L1 Dutch or in L2 English; the verb prior to the switch was manipulated for cognate status. Although switching from L1 to L2 showed no effect of the cognate, latencies of slow shadowers indicated that switching from L2 to L1 was easier when the switch was preceded by a cognate verb rather than a noncognate control verb, suggesting that verb cognates can to some extent modulate switch costs in sentence context.