Von Holzen, K. 1 , Fennell, C. 2 & Mani, N. 1
1 Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
2 Ottawa University
The purpose of the current study was to explore the cognate facilitation effect (CFE) in a young bilingual population and to examine the effect of increasing phonological overlap on the CFE. Using an intermodal preferential looking task, we examined monolingual (German L1) and bilingual (German L1, English L2) toddlers' recognition of words embedded in both English and German carrier sentences. Target words were: cognate (similar pronunciation across German and English, e.g. Fish-Fisch), similar (sound similar but not phonemically identical, e.g. English- tiger /taIgE/, German - Tiger / ti:gA/), or non-similar (no phonological similarity across languages, e.g. English- bird, German - Vogel). Similar to older bilinguals, we predicted that bilingual toddlers would show a CFE: better recognition of cognate and similar words compared to non-similar words, regardless of test language. If the source of the CFE in bilingual toddlers is the presence of two similar-sounding lexical entries, monolinguals should not show the effect in either language. However, if the CFE can be driven purely by phonological overlap, requiring no second lexicon with corresponding entries, monolingual German toddlers tested in English should show better recognition of cognate, and perhaps similar, words compared to non-similar words, due to phonological overlap with their known language. Our series of experiments demonstrate the CFE in the L1 (German) of bilingual toddlers, but no CFE was found in the L2 (English). Instead, the inhibited response to similar words presented in English may be due to phonological "jitter" in the words' L2 representations (similar-sounding to L1, but not overlapping). Interestingly, when monolingual toddlers were tested in English, an unknown language, they showed facilitation for cognate words, a (pseudo-) CFE. This questions the argument that cognate words have a special distinction in the bilingual lexicon and suggests that phonology plays a greater role than formerly credited.