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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 11:3 (2021) ► pp.389–417

Cross-language effects of phonological and orthographic similarity in cognate word recognition

The role of language dominance

ORCID logo | Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
ORCID logo | University of California, Santa Cruz
ORCID logo | University of California, Santa Barbara

This study investigated the extent to which phonological and orthographic overlap between the two languages of bilinguals predicts word processing abilities in their dominant and non-dominant languages. Forty-four English-dominant L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers and Spanish-dominant Spanish heritage speakers performed a lexical decision task while reading words in English and Spanish. We calculated orthographic and phonological similarity of cognate and noncognate words using the Levenshtein distance measure. Results showed that both bilingual groups benefited from orthographic similarity when reading Spanish and English words, whereas a facilitative effect was restricted to Spanish words that shared phonology across languages. These findings suggest a different contribution of phonological and orthographic similarity in bilingual word recognition, independently of language dominance.

Keywords: bilingual word recognition, phonological and orthographic similarities, language dominance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cross-language activation in the processing of cognates
  • 3.The present study
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Stimuli
      • 3.1.3Apparatus and procedure
      • 3.1.4Data analyses
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18095.car
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