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ABSTRACT
This longitudinal study investigated to what extent the acquisition of cognates among bilingual children depends on the degree of cross-language similarity and intensity of exposure to the tested language, and whether children’s sensitivity to cognates with different degrees of cross-language similarity changes over time. For three consecutive years, 120 Frisian-Dutch bilingual children were tested on their Frisian receptive vocabulary. The sample was split into three groups that differed with respect to intensity of exposure to Frisian at home. In the receptive vocabulary task, cross-language similarity was systematically manipulated through four cognate categories, differing in their degree of overlap between Frisian and Dutch. The results showed a gradual cognate facilitation effect for children with a low intensity of exposure to Frisian. The higher the degree of cross-language similarity, the better their performance. This implies that the co-activation of the two languages depends on the degree of cross-language similarity. Over time, their performance improved the most on non-identical cognates with a cross-linguistic phonological regularity between Frisian and Dutch. This suggests that as they grow older, children with a low intensity of exposure to Frisian become better at recognizing regularities in the overlap of the Frisian and Dutch phonological systems.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Evelyn Bosma is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics at the Frisian Academy and the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on bilingual children's language and cognitive development.
Elma Blom is associate professor at Utrecht University where she works at the Department of Special Education. Her research is about language development, with a special focus on multilingualism, language disorders and interactions between language and cognition.
Eric Hoekstra is researcher at the Frisian Academy, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research is about language change, frequency and analogy in a bilingual context.
Arjen Versloot is a professor in Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and is also affiliated with the Frisian Academy. His research focuses on language variation and change, with an emphasis on diachronic studies.