The Impact of Lexical Co-activation through Cognates on L2 Rule Learning

Abstract

The cognate facilitation effect (Dijkstra et al., 1999) makes cognates easier to process than non-cognates, and this advantage has been found to ease lexical and syntactic processing (e.g. Costa et al., 2000; Hopp, 2017). To my knowledge, there is not currently any study which assesses whether cognates ease rule learning. I developed an artificial language which allowed me to test the hypothesis that cross-linguistic activation of the lexicon through cognates facilitates the learning of an L2 grammatical rule. I created two versions of the artificial language, the difference between the two being the cognate (Spanish-Basque) or non-cognate status of their lexical items (n= 30). In this language, sentences responded to either SOV or OSV word orders. The grammatical rule to be learnt described the subject-object assignment pattern: subjects were marked with an -ak morpheme and objects with an -a. Forty native speakers of Spanish (20 for each version of the language) were explicitly taught the cognate/non-cognate vocabulary and the grammatical rule. Later, learning was assessed by means of a sentence-picture matching paradigm. In a post-test, all participants listened to sentences made up of previously unheard cognates to test the hypothesis that the cognate facilitation effect would improve non-cognate learners’ performance. Reaction times and accuracy rates were measured. I found that rule learning was attained when the vocabulary of the language was both cognate and non-cognate with the L1, even if the magnitude of the learning was greater for the cognate group of participants. This finding could be explained by claiming that retrieving non-cognates was very costly, while the co-activation of the L1 through cognates made the retrieval of these words virtually cost-free. As a result, cognate learners disposed of plenty of resources to learn the grammatical rule, but non-cognate learners did not. This result was further corroborated in the post-test, when participants of the non-cognate version of the language significantly improved in their learning of the rule.