Comesaña, M. 1 , Soares, A. P. 1 , Frade, S. 1 , Sánchez-Casas, R. 1, 2 , Rauber, A. . 1, 3 , Pinheiro, A. P. 1 & Fraga, I. . 1, 4
1 University of Minho, Braga (Portugal)
2 University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona (Spain)
3 Catholic University of Pelotas (Brazil)
4 University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
In bilingualism research, the study of why cognate words are processed differently from non-cognate words has been intriguing psycholinguistic researchers for decades. Two major positions have been proposed: a) a lexical-morphological hypothesis (Davis et al., 2010) according to which the differential processing observed to cognate words is due to their special morphological representation in bilingual memory that is not present in non cognate words; and b) a symbolic, localist connectionist framework (Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sappelli, & Baayen, 2010) that emphasizes the cross-linguistic similarity of cognate words, rather than a different lexical status, as the cause of their particular processing.
The aim of this study was to examine how the phonological and orthographic similarity of cognate words affects bilingual word recognition and whether the results are modulated by SOA exposure. We recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERP) data in a masked translation priming paradigm in order to explore the time course of form and meaning activation during silent reading in a second language.
One-hundred and ninety-two words were selected: 96 cognate words attending to their orthographic -O- and phonological -P- overlap (24 O+P+; 24 O+P-; 24 O-P+; 24 O-P-) vs. 96 non-cognate words. Cognate and non-cognate words were matched on frequency, length, grammatical category, thematic structure, and orthographic and phonological neighbors. Besides, in cognate words, the experimental conditions (O+P+, O+P-, O-P+ and O-P-) did not statistically differ in these variables. Forty-eight proficient bilinguals of European Portuguese (L1)-English (L2) were randomly distributed into two groups as a function of SOA (47 ms vs. 147 ms) and prime duration was kept constant (47ms). The results showed that the processing of cognate words was modulated by phonological and orthographic overlap, which motivates the discussion of these findings in the context of the two aforementioned theoretical positions.