Cumulative Word Occurrence and Cognate Facilitation in L2 Sentence Reading.

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2023-07-11

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en

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Research has found that the cognate facilitation effect is modulated by several factors, including language proficiency, but there are only a few studies looking into the effects of cumulative word frequency, which is a unique characteristic of form-overlapping words like cognates. This study examined the effects of cumulative word frequency on identical cognates in L2 sentence context. 45 Dutch-English bilinguals took part in an online self-paced reading task in which they read English sentences with an English-Dutch cognate or an English control word. The word frequency was manipulated to investigate the effect of cumulative word frequency. The findings revealed that the participants deviated from the usual findings as word frequency effects were absent and the cognate facilitation effect was smaller than normal. English word prevalence was the best measure of word occurrence to predict reading times and there was no significant effect of cumulative word frequency.

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