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Interlingual influence in bilingual speech: Cognate status effect in a continuum of bilingualism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2011

MARK AMENGUAL
MARK AMENGUAL*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin. 1 University Station B3700, Austin, TX 78712, USAamengual@mail.utexas.edu
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Abstract

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish–English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish–English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.

Keywords

VOTcognate effectsbilingual mental lexiconphonetic interferenceexemplar theory
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 517 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

I am deeply thankful to Cindy Blanco, Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, Barbara Bullock, Scott Myers, Miquel Simonet, and three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Anne Watson and Eva Vives for their help in locating participants in Spain. Finally, I wish to thank my participants for their patience and their time. All errors remain my own.

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