Anna Sara Hexeberg Romøren

Purpose: This study examined cognate facilitation effects (CFEs) on accuracy and response times in noun production and comprehension among bilingual and monolingual preschoolers. Design: We used the Polish and Norwegian versions of the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). 14 Polish and 12 Norwegian cognates were selected based on expert judgments and normalized Levenshtein distance. Data and Analysis: The sample comprised 156 children aged 3–6 years: 52 Polish–Norwegian bilinguals and 52 monolingual speakers of each language. Accuracy and response times were analyzed as a function of group, cognate status, and age using mixed-effects logistic and linear models; additional models compared the bilinguals’ two languages. Findings/Conclusions: Bilinguals named cognates more accurately and faster than non-cognates in the Norwegian production task, with both effects significantly larger than in monolinguals. Cognates were also more accurate than non-cognates in Polish production and Norwegian comprehension, but these differences were not specific to bilinguals. No facilitation was found for comprehension speed in either language or for Polish comprehension accuracy. Direct within-bilingual comparisons provided no evidence that the cognate effect was stronger in the non-dominant language, Norwegian. Only in Norwegian production was the effect significantly larger in bilinguals than in monolinguals and significant only within the bilingual group. Originality: This is the first study to examine CFEs in Polish–Norwegian bilingual children alongside matched Polish and Norwegian monolingual controls, and one of the few to examine both production and comprehension in preschoolers. Significance/Implications: The study provides evidence of cognate facilitation in accuracy and response times in production in the children’s non-dominant language (Norwegian), consistent with cross-linguistic activation in the bilingual lexicon. Cognate–non-cognate differences in other tasks were not specific to bilinguals and therefore cannot be unambiguously attributed to cross-linguistic activation. The findings highlight the importance of considering cognates in bilingual assessment and, potentially, intervention.

In a number of languages, prosody is used to highlight new information (or focus). In Dutch, focus is marked by accentuation, whereby focal constituents are accented and post-focal constituents are de-accented. Even if pausing is not traditionally seen as a cue to focus in Dutch, several previous studies have pointed to a possible relationship between pausing and information structure. Considering that Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds are not yet completely proficient in using accentuation for focus and that children generally pause more than adults, we asked whether pausing might be an available parameter for children to manipulate for focus. Sentences with varying focus structure were elicited from 10 Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds and 9 Dutch-speaking adults by means of a picture-matching game. Comparing pause durations before focal and non-focal targets showed pre-target pauses to be significantly longer when the targets were focal than when they were not. Notably, the use of pausing was more robust in the children than in the adults, suggesting that children exploit pausing to mark focus more generally than adults do, at a stage where their mastery of the canonical cues to focus is still developing.