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Developmental changes associated with cross-language similarity in bilingual children
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia
Lela Ivaz
Aina Casaponsa
BCBL. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language; Donostia, Spain
Contact information:
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL)
Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 2
20009 Donostia, SPAIN
j.dunabeitia@bcbl.eu
+34 943 309 300 (ext. 208)
Acknowledgements: This research has been partially funded by grants PSI2012-32123 from the
Spanish Government, ERC-AdG-295362 grant from the European Research Council, and by the
AThEME project funded by the European Union (grant number 613465).
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Abstract: The main goal of the present study was to investigate how the degree of orthographic
overlap between translation equivalents influences bilingual word recognition processes at
different stages of reading development. Spanish-Basque bilingual children with ages ranging
from 8 to 15 years were tested in an explicit translation recognition task with a large set of items.
Critically, the degree of cross-language similarity (i.e., the cognate status) between the references
and the correct targets was manipulated along a continuum in order to investigate how the
reliance on cross-language orthographic overlap varies as a function of reading experience.
Results showed that younger children were significantly more sensitive to the cognate status of
words than older children while recognizing translation equivalents, and that this difference did
not depend on the speed of response of the participants. These results demonstrate that the
influence of cross-language similarity progressively diminishes as a function of increased
exposure to print together with the maturation of the mechanisms responsible for language
interference suppression, as suggested by developmental models of bilingual lexical access.
Short title: Cognate effects during childhood.
Keywords: Translation recognition; Cognate words; Reading development; Cross-language
interactions; Orthographic processing.
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1. Introduction
Numerous recent studies have explored how bilingual individuals process words in their
languages at different stages of language consolidation and proficiency, and several factors have
been found to modulate bilingual word recognition. Bilingual lexical access largely depends on
second language (L2) proficiency and on the age of L2 acquisition (see van Hell & Tanner, 2012,
for a review), the combination of languages at hand and their orthographic distance (e.g., same
script vs. different script; see Chen, & Ng, 1989; Dimitropoulou, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2011a;
Gollan, Forster & Frost, 1997; Wu & Thierry, 2010), or the orthotactic rules that govern each of
the languages and the language-dependent orthographic regularities (e.g., Casaponsa, Carreiras
& Duñabeitia, 2014; Vaid & Frenck-Mestre, 2002; Van Kesteren, Dijkstra, & Smedt, 2012). At
this regard, research on the processing of translation equivalents has become essential for our
understanding of how bilinguals process print in different languages. Translation equivalents are
words that belong to different languages but that denote the same concept, and they can vary in
the degree of orthographic and/or phonological overlap, going from non-overlapping
representations (e.g., the Spanish-English translation equivalents playa-beach), to completely
overlapping word forms (e.g., the Spanish and English words detective).
One of the most interesting findings from studies on bilingual word processing is the
degree of automaticity with which bilinguals activate translation equivalents when reading words
in one of their languages (e.g., Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2007; Dimitropoulou, Duñabeitia,
& Carreiras, 2011a, 2011b; Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010; Duyck & Warlop, 2009;
Grainger & Frenck-Mestre, 1998; Schoonbaert, Duyck, Brysbaert, & Hartsuiker, 2009;
Schoonbaert, Holcomb, Grainger, & Hartsuiker, 2010; Thierry & Wu, 2007). In this vein, recent
behavioral studies have shown that it is easier to recognize native (L1) and non-native (L2)
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words when they are preceded by their translation equivalents in the form of briefly presented
primes (e.g., masked priming paradigm). Interestingly, this facilitation effect for translation
equivalents has been shown to depend on several factors such as L2 proficiency, translation
direction and sub- and supra-lexical properties of translation equivalents. It has generally been
found that the influence of the L1 over L2 word processing is significantly greater than vice
versa when it comes to translation recognition in unbalanced bilinguals, giving rise to a
translation direction asymmetry which only disappears at L2 native-like levels of proficiency
(see Dimitropoulou et al., 2011a, 2011b; Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010; Schoonbaert et
al., 2009). While balanced simultaneous bilinguals automatically activate translation equivalents
to the same extent when reading words in any of their languages independently of the translation
direction, at lower levels of L2 proficiency the translation facilitation effects are mainly found in
the L1-L2 direction (e.g., De Groot & Nas, 1991; Dimitropoulou et al., 2011a; Gollan, et al.,
1997; Jiang & Forster, 2001; Kim & Davis, 2003; Williams, 1994) and only a few studies have
found a translation facilitation effect in the L2-L1 direction (Dimitropoulou et al., 2011b; Duyck
& Warlop, 2009; Schoonbaert et al., 2009; Schoonbaert et al., 2010).
Moreover, it has been shown that the translation facilitation effects are also modulated by
the degree of word-form overlap between languages. Greater translation effects have been found
for cognates (i.e., words that share semantic and orthographic and/or phonological
representations across languages) than for non-cognates (i.e., words that only share semantic
representations). The confluence of overlapping representational levels in cognates provides
them with a processing advantage over non-cognate words and gives rise to the cognate
facilitation effect: bilinguals recognize, read, produce and translate cognates faster and more
accurately than non-cognates (e.g., Caramazza & Brones, 1979; Cristoffanini, Kirsner, & Milech,
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1986; De Groot, Borgwaldt, Bos, & Van den Eijnden, 2002; Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten
Brinke, 1998; Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010; Lemhöfer & Dijkstra, 2004; Lemhöfer,
Dijkstra, & Michel, 2004; van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; see Boada, Sánchez-Casas,
Gavilán, García-Albea, & Tokowicz, 2013, for a review). While the precise mechanisms driving
the cognate effects are still being debated, they are typically thought to arise from the convergent
triggering of language-shared orthographic, phonological and semantic activation for cognate
words. Following the interpretation of connectionist models (e.g., Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998,
2002), the cognate effects may result from the combination of bottom-up and top-down
activation, so that “as a consequence of orthographic and semantic overlap, more semantic
activation will arise for cognates than for non-cognates”, and “the two cognate readings together
may induce more global activation in the lexicon than other similar words (such as neighbors)
do” (Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sappelli, & Baayen, 2010, p. 299). This way, a Spanish-
English bilingual would access an English word like detective significantly faster than a word
like beach due to the greater overlap at different levels (sub-lexical and lexico-semantic) of the
former word with its corresponding Spanish translation equivalent (detective-detective vs. playa-
beach).
Interestingly, the degree of orthographic overlap that cognates share across languages
largely determines the size of the cognate facilitation effect. It has been found that
orthographically identical cognates (e.g., the Spanish-English example detective) are processed
faster than near-identical cognates (e.g., the Spanish-English cognate pairs evidencia-evidence;
see Dijkstra, van Heuven, & Grainger, 1999; Dijkstra et al., 2010; Lemhöfer & Dijkstra, 2004;
Lemhöfer et al., 2004; Van Assche, Duyck, Hartsuiker, & Diependaele, 2009). According to
localist connectionist models of bilingual lexical access (e.g., BIA / BIA+ models; see Dijkstra &
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Van Heuven, 2002), an increase in cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents yields
higher levels of activation for the two words in the lexicon, which leads to a modulation of
cognate effects as a function of the degree of orthographic overlap. Furthermore, and critically
for the purposes of the current study, Bultena, Dijkstra, & Van Hell (2014) showed that the
magnitude of the cognate facilitation effect when reading in a second language decreases as a
function of increased L2 proficiency. Nonetheless, and despite the wide range of factors shown
to modulate the cognate facilitation effect, what still remains to be explored is the sole influence
of reading experience (and not proficiency in a given language) on the cognate facilitation
effects, and the current cross-sectional study endeavors to do so by investigating how sensitive
bilingual developing readers of different ages are to cognates and non-cognates. To date, the
majority of studies exploring cross-language similarity have predominantly tested young adult
participants (e.g., all the aforementioned studies) and little is known about the way in which
reading expertise modulates bilingual visual word recognition and about the developmental
changes that underlie bilingual word comprehension.
Literacy acquisition and consolidation during elementary school has been shown to
generate critical changes in the organization of the orthographic lexicon of novice readers. At the
beginning stages of reading development, lexical competition between neighboring orthographic
representations is enhanced as compared to later stages in which reading skills are consolidated
and the structure of the mental lexicon is better established (e.g., Castles, Davis, & Forster, 2003;
Duñabeitia & Vidal-Abarca, 2008; Laxon, Coltheart, & Keating, 1988; Perea & Estévez, 2008).
It has been suggested that lexical competition among orthographically similar word forms
decreases as an inverse function of reading expertise (see Acha & Perea, 2008, for review), and
as a function of the development of top-down regulatory connections from the language nodes
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and of lateral inhibitory connections (see Grainger et al., 2010, for review of theoretical
models)1. Considering that orthographic similarity is one of the key factors responsible for the
cognate effects, and that younger children are more sensitive than older individuals to
orthographic overlap among competing lexical forms, our guiding hypothesis in the current study
is that the processing of translation equivalents with different degrees of orthographic overlap in
the early stages of life (e.g., during childhood and early adolescence) will markedly change over
the course of reading development. While most of the studies testing this hypothesis have
focused on between-word competition effects in monolingual children, the present study
explored highly proficient bilingual children tested with words from their two lexicons as a
window to uncovering developmental changes in the organization of the bilingual lexicon.
Bilingual lexical processing necessarily requires language control mechanisms (e.g.,
Costa, Santesteban, & Caño, 2005; Green, 1998), and these mechanisms are largely based on
skills related to interference suppression and inhibitory control that develop during childhood
and early adolescence (e.g., Antón et al., 2014; Rueda et al., 2004; see Diamond, 2013, for
review). While it is unclear whether or not bilingual and monolingual children differ in executive
functioning and domain-general inhibitory capacities (cf. Duñabeitia et al., 2014), the necessity
of bilingual readers to efficiently organize the words from two languages in lexico-semantic
memory is uncontroversial. However, little is known with regard to the specific manner in which
the bilingual (orthographic) lexicon is created and even less is known about the developmental
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1!Language nodes were assumed to play a key role at the word identification (lexical) level in the BIA
model, limiting cross-language interference via top-down inhibitory control (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998). In
contrast, in its latest version (BIA+) they were assumed to have a representational status, providing information
regarding language membership as a function of ortho-phonological information, and regulating the interference
caused by the non-target language at a post-lexical stage (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). Even though the role of
language nodes was not fully determined in the BIA-d model (Grainger et al., 2010), they were conceptualized in
line with the original proposal, exerting top-down inhibition from the L2 word forms to the L1 translation
equivalents, and this inhibitory control was assumed to develop as a function of increased proficiency in the L2.
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changes that arise during the course of bilingual reading consolidation. As we will review below,
to date, the number of studies testing this issue is very limited, and in most cases restricted to
children who are L2 learners.
A promising way to explore bilingual lexical organization, development and competition
effects is to investigate the changes in the processing of words with varying degrees of
orthographic similarity across languages in children (e.g., cognate words such as the Spanish-
English word pair guitarra-guitar). In their seminal study on this topic, Brenders, van Hell and
Dijkstra (2011) conducted a series of lexical decision experiments testing different groups of
Dutch children who were in the process of acquiring English as a second language. Specifically,
in two cross-sectional experiments they tested 5th graders (mean age of 10.5 years), 7th graders
(mean age of 12.6 years) and 9th graders (mean age of 14.3 years) in a series of lexical decision
tasks including cognates and control words. Their results showed that the cognate effects (shorter
RTs and lower error rates for cognates than for non-cognates) were present in all groups when
responding to L2 words (Experiment 1), whereas it vanished when responding to L1 words
(Experiment 2). Interestingly, there were no statistical differences between the magnitudes of the
cognate effects across groups in the L2 lexical decision task, in spite of a numerical trend
suggesting somewhat larger cognate effects for the younger group (52ms, 10ms and 25ms,
respectively). In a related study, Poarch and van Hell (2012) explored the cognate facilitation
effects in a series of language production tasks (picture naming) with multilingual children and
adults, following preceding research (cf. Hoshino & Kroll, 2008). In a first experiment, they
tested German children (ages ranging between 5 and 8 years) who were immersed in an English-
speaking academic environment and who were relatively proficient in English, and demonstrated
the presence of robust cognate effects in an English picture naming task (but not in their L1,
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German). In a subsequent experiment exclusively testing more proficient yet unbalanced
bilinguals from the same cohort, they showed that the presence of cognate effects also extended
to the L1, even though the magnitude of the effect was still larger in the L2-naming condition.
When these results were compared to those obtained from a bilingual adult sample, Poarch and
van Hell observed that the magnitude of the cognate effects was two times larger in children than
in adults, both in their L1 and in their L2 (66ms vs. 38ms, and 197ms vs. 102ms, respectively).
This result was accompanied by a general difference in response latencies between children and
adults, showing that children took more time to respond than adults.
Based on the aforementioned results suggesting a developmental change in the
processing of cognates as a function of reading expertise in bilinguals (e.g., the numerical
differences observed by Brenders et al., 2011, with L2 learners in their lexical decision
experiments and those reported by Poarch & van Hell, 2012, with highly proficient bilinguals in
their picture naming tasks), in the current study we tested Spanish-Basque balanced bilingual
children of different ages in two explicit translation recognition tasks including words with
different degrees of cross-language similarity. We tested a large group (n=100) of bilingual
participants of different ages using a large set of translation equivalents, while measuring the
influence of the cognate rate of the translations on their performance. We used a modified
version of the traditional translation recognition task (see Prior, Kroll, & MacWhinney, 2012, for
review), in which a target word in one language was followed by two words in the other
language, out of which only one was the target’s translation equivalent that the participants were
asked to identify.
Following preceding evidence, some predictions could be made with regard to how
participants would perform in these translation recognition tasks. First, it was expected that older
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participants would perform better (namely, exhibit shorter response latencies) than younger
participants due to their greater exposure to print. Second, considering preceding studies on
bilingual word recognition and translation processing, a general effect of cognate status (namely,
a modulation of the translation recognition processes as a function of the orthographic overlap
between word forms across languages) was also expected in both language directions and for all
participants. Finally, bearing in mind the amount of orthographic information cognates carry (to
which novice readers are predicted to be especially responsive), larger cognate effects were
expected for younger than older participants.
2. Experiment
2.1. Methods
2.1.1. Participants. One hundred Spanish-Basque bilingual children and adolescents (68
females) were recruited from a bilingual school in the Basque Country. These children had an
age range between 8 and 15 years (mean age=11.51 years, SD=2.21). The distribution of
participants according to their age (in years) is presented in Figure 1. None of the participants
had previously been diagnosed with any neurocognitive disorder or learning disability. In order
to preserve the homogeneity across the different age groups, we made sure that all the
participants were born and raised in the Basque Country, and that their parents were also
originally from the Basque Country. All participants were native speakers of Spanish and
Basque, and they were exposed to the two languages from birth at home. Besides, all participants
had been attending the same bilingual school from the first grade of elementary school onwards.
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All participants had daily exposure to Basque and Spanish as vehicular languages (linguae
francae) during tuition, and all were perfectly fluent in both languages. As already shown in
several scientific reports, pupils attending Spanish-Basque bilingual schools in the Basque
Country, where both languages are used as the languages of instruction, are highly proficient in
both languages (see Antón et al., 2014; Duñabeitia et al., 2014). According to the legal
requirements, schools in the Basque Country following a bilingual instruction method (called the
B model) require that teachers switch from one language to the other as they switch academic
subjects, ensuring a similar distribution of the two languages across subjects and school time
(roughly 50% in each language). This way, Basque children attending bilingual schools are
actively exposed to the two languages on a daily basis during schooling. All the participants’
parents or legal guardians signed informed consent forms before the experiment and were
appropriately informed regarding the basic procedure of the experiment, according to the ethical
commitments established by the BCBL Scientific Committee and by the BCBL Ethics
Committee that approved the experiment.
2.1.2. Materials. For the Spanish-to-Basque translation direction, 700 Spanish words were
selected as references, taken from B-Pal (Davis & Perea, 2005). These words were part of a
translation database containing 2100 Spanish and Basque word pairs rated for the quality of
translation, age of acquisition in each of the languages and concreteness by a group of native
Basque-Spanish bilingual adults (Duñabeitia, Casaponsa, Dimitropoulou, Martí, Larraza, &
Carreiras, in preparation). The mean length of these Spanish words was 7.67 characters
(SD=2.14), the mean word frequency was 45.26 appearances per million words (SD=79.92), the
mean AoA was 3.2 (SD=0.58) on a scale from 1 to 5 where higher values corresponded to words
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acquired later in life, the mean number of orthographic neighbors was 1.43 (SD=2.65) and the
mean concreteness was 4 (SD=0.86) on a scale from 1 to 7 where higher values corresponded to
very concrete items. Each of these 700 Spanish reference words was then paired with two
different Basque words. One of the Basque words corresponded to the effective translation of the
Spanish word (e.g., the Spanish word salud (health) was paired with its corresponding translation
equivalent in Basque, osasun). The mean length of these Basque words was 7.59 characters
(SD=2.10), the mean word frequency taken from E-Hitz; (Perea, Urkia, Davis, Agirre, Laseka, &
Carreiras, 2006) was 57.32 appearances per million words (SD=218.93), the mean AoA was 3.26
(SD=0.51), the mean number of orthographic neighbors was 1.26 (SD=2.16) and the mean
concreteness was 4.03 (SD=0.84). These translation equivalents were rated as correctly matching
translations according to the 1-to-7 scale used in the translation database where 7 corresponded
to a perfect translation (mean=6.65, SD=0.19). Critically for the purposes of the present study,
the cognate status of these translation equivalents was calculated following the length-corrected
version of the orthographic Levenshtein distance between Spanish and Basque, ranging from 0
(non-cognates; e.g., febrero and otsail, the Spanish and Basque words for February,
respectively) to 1 (full cognates; e.g., maleta, the Spanish and Basque word for suitcase; see
Casaponsa, Antón, Pérez, & Duñabeitia, 2015; Duñabeitia, Dimitropoulou, Morris, &
Diependaele, 2013; Schepens, Dijkstra, & Grootjen, 2011). Given the extremely high
correspondence between the Spanish and Basque phonemes and considering that all the Basque
letters are also present in the Spanish alphabet, we focused exclusively on the orthographic
Levenshtein distance. The cognate status ranged from 0 to 1, and the mean cognate rate was 0.46
(SD=0.36). The distribution of items according to the length-corrected Levenshtein distance is
presented in Figure 1. In order to associate each Spanish reference with an unrelated Basque
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word, the real Basque translations were rotated across trials and paired with mismatching
Spanish references. Care was taken so that the unrelated Spanish-Basque pairs did not overlap in
either orthography or semantics (e.g., the Spanish word salud (health) was paired with the
Basque word autobus (bus)). For the Basque-to-Spanish translation direction task, the same 700
Basque words that were previously selected as targets were now used as references (e.g., osasun
(health)). These Basque references were paired with their corresponding Spanish translations
(e.g., salud), or with an orthographically and semantically unrelated Spanish word created by
rotating the related items (e.g., autobús (bus)). In order to maintain homogeneity across the two
translation directions, the Spanish and Basque unrelated words used in each trial were also
translation equivalents across directions (e.g., autobus and autobús).
< Insert Figure 1 here >
2.1.3. Procedure. All the participants completed both tasks (i.e., translation matching from
Spanish to Basque and translation matching from Basque to Spanish) in two different
experimental sessions that took place in two different days with at least a three-day lag between
them and in a counterbalanced order across participants. We explicitly counterbalanced the order
of the tasks across participants and set a delay between sessions in order to avoid the presence of
cross-language repetition priming effects, which have been previously reported in tasks that
require conceptual processing when the study and test phase take place in the same session (see
Zeelenberg & Pecher, 2003). The items were presented using the Experiment Builder software
on a CRT screen (positioned approximately 70 cm in front of the participants) that was linked to
a PC, and data collection associated with button presses was collected with a response box
(Empirisoft DirectIN High Speed Button-Box). Data collection was always carried out
individually on the school premises during the teaching hours. In each experimental session,
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participants were informed that they were going to be presented with a series of words
corresponding to the reference language (Spanish or Basque, depending on the translation
direction) presented in the center of the screen, followed by two words in a different language
presented on the left and right sides of the screen. They were instructed to press, as quickly and
accurately as possible, one out of two buttons on the response box to indicate which of the two
target words corresponded to the exact translation of the reference word (the leftmost or the
rightmost button, depending on the location of the correct translation on the screen). Across
trials, half of the correct translations for each reference appeared on the right of the screen, and
the other half appeared on the left side. Each trial started with the presentation of a mask (e.g.,
######) for 500ms located in the exact place were the reference would appear. Then the
corresponding word was presented in uppercase Courier New font for 1000ms. Finally, the two
target words were presented in lowercase letters until a participant responded or for a maximum
of 5000ms (see Figure 2). After each trial, feedback about the accuracy was provided for 500ms
in the center of the screen (! for correct responses and " for incorrect responses). The order of
trial presentation was randomized across participants, and there were 6 small breaks during the
experiment. Prior to the experimental trials, each participant was presented with a short practice
consisting of 20 items (10 requiring a left response and 10 requiring a right response). All
interactions with the participants and the experimental instructions were in the language
corresponding to the references. Each experimental session lasted for around 50 minutes.
< Insert Figure 2 here >
2.2. Results
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Correct RTs for target words were analyzed with linear mixed effects (lme) models as
implemented in the lme4 package (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014) in R (R CoreTeam,
2013). Significance p-values and Type III F-statistics for main effects and interactions were
calculated using Satterthwaite approximations to degrees of freedom as implemented in the
lmerTest package (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2014). Timeouts (Basque targets:
.59%; Spanish targets: .52%), errors (Basque targets: 7.72%; Spanish targets: 9.10%), and RTs
shorter than 300 ms (Basque targets: .24%; Spanish targets: .41%) were excluded from the
analysis. For each translation direction, latencies shorter than Q1-2.5*IQR and longer than
Q3+2.5*IQR for each participant (Basque targets: 1.78%; Spanish targets: 1.94%) and item
(Basque targets: 1.80%; Spanish target: 1.86%) were also discarded. This resulted in a dataset of
123,076 data points. Transformed RTs, either by the inverse-transform (-1000/RT) or
logarithmic scale attenuated the skew in their distribution just for the oldest participants.
Therefore, in order to avoid any age-dependent bias in the distribution of the RTs in the analysis,
RTs were entered into the model without any transformation.
We first investigated the presence of a significant interaction between the continuous
predictor Cognate Rate and Age, and the categorical factor Translation Direction (i.e., Spanish-
to-Basque and Basque-to-Spanish) with subjects and items as crossed random factors (e.g.,
Baayen, 2008; Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008). Apart from the experimental conditions, we
also considered three other control variables that might affect decision latencies along the
experimental session, as shown in previous studies (e.g., Diependaele, Duñabeitia, Morris, &
Keuleers, 2011; Mulder, Dijkstra, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2014, among others). Thus, reaction
times to the previous trial (Previous Response), Trial Order, and Session Order were considered
as predictors. The maximal-order interaction of the within-unit predictors of interest were
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included as random slopes (see Barr et al., 2013). The random-effect structure of the final model
consisted of random intercepts for Item (SD=145), and Subject (SD=206), by-subject random
slopes for the interaction of Cognate Rate with Translation Direction (Basque targets: SD=160;
Spanish targets: SD= 162), and by-item random slopes for Age (SD=21). Due to the differences
in scale of our predictors resulting in a very large eigen value in the model, the predictor Age was
centered for its inclusion in the final model. The standard deviation of the residual was 339.
< Insert Tables 1 and 2 here >
The F-statistics associated with the main effects and interactions resulting from the model
are presented in Table 1, and Table 2 summarizes the coefficients along with standard errors and
t-values. Results from the model showed a significant inverse relation between reaction times
and Age, showing that response latencies decreased as age increased. The main effect of Cognate
Rate was significant, showing that response latencies also decreased as the cognate status of
words increased (i.e., translation equivalents with large orthographic overlap across languages
yielded shorter response latencies). The main effect of Translation Direction was significant,
showing that participants responded faster when targets were presented in Spanish than when
they were presented in Basque. This factor significantly interacted with Age, showing that the
decrease in reaction times as Age increased was milder for Spanish targets (b= -78, SD= 10, t=-
8.22, p<.001) than for Basque targets (b= -87, SD=10, t=-9.14, p<.001; see Figure 3).
Interestingly for the purposes of the current study, the interaction between Cognate Rate and Age
resulted significant in the model and did not significantly differ between both translation
directions (see Table 1). As can be seen in Figure 3 (b and c), there was a marked decrease in the
reaction times as the orthographic overlap between languages increased and, critically, the
magnitude of these cognate effects diminished with age. In other words, results showed that the
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magnitude of the cognate effects significantly decreased as an inverse function of age in both
translation directions (Basque targets: b= 41, SD= 8, t= 5.30, p<.001; Spanish targets: b= 36,
SD= 8, t=4.51, p<.001), being maximal at initial stages of reading development and
progressively diminishing with age.
< Insert Figure 3 here >
Recent research has suggested that the classic cognate effects may depend on the
presence of identical (fully overlapping) cognates within the list of stimuli (see Comesaña et al.,
2015; see also Comesaña et al., 2012). Given that the current experiment also included identical
cognates, we decided to further explore whether the presence of such translation equivalents may
have modulated the results by reanalyzing the data while excluding fully overlapping cognates
from the list. Tentatively, it could be argued that, in the context of the current experiment,
translation recognition of full cognate words (translation equivalents with cognate rates of 1)
could be guided by a mere repetition-match strategy, thus boosting the presence of a cognate
effect. To ensure that the results of the model were not biased by this factor, the same model was
refitted by excluding fully overlapping cognate translations from the set (86 items). Importantly,
the analysis yielded a similar pattern of results. The three main effects remained significant
(Cognate Rate: F=145.25, p<.001; Age: F=43.83, p<.001, Translation Direction: F=18.93,
p<.001). As in the analysis with the whole set of items, in this new analysis the interaction
between Age and Translation Direction was also found (F=6.79, p<.01) and, critically, the
interaction between Cognate Rate and Age was also replicated (F=14.95, p<.001), showing that
response latencies diminished as the orthographic overlap between translations increased, and
that these cognate effects diminished with Age in both translation directions (Basque targets: b=
40, SD= 9, t=4.72, p<.001; Spanish targets: b= 34, SD= 9, t= 3.84, p<.001). Furthermore, the
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17
magnitude of these effects did not statistically differ between translation directions (F=.65,
p=.52).
Previous literature has shown that overall speed differences across participants can lead
to spurious over-additive interactions (see Faust, Balota, Spieler, & Ferraro, 1999; Ziegler,
Bertrand, Lété, & Grainger, 2014, among others). Not surprisingly, the participants tested in the
current study showed an overall effect of Age (i.e., shorter reaction times for the older
participants), and this could be thought to contribute to the greater Cognate Rate effects (i.e., the
more marked slopes) for the younger participants. To address this critical issue, we standardized
the data for each participant using z-scores. Thus, data were transformed so that each participant
had a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 in each translation direction. We then reanalyzed
these data following the same structure used in the main analysis in order to explore whether the
interaction between Age and Cognate Rate remained significant with the standardized scores.
Results are summarized in Tables 3 and 4. Results confirmed the significant inverse relationship
between Cognate Rate and Age, as shown in the analysis on the non-standardized RTs. The
interaction between these two continuous predictors of interest was significant, showing that the
slope of Cognate Rate was more pronounced for older than for younger participants (i.e., greater
cognate effects for younger children; see Figure 4). Hence, the results from the analysis on the
transformed data replicated the initial analysis, showing that as the age increased, the magnitude
of the cognate effects decreased.
< Insert Tables 3 and 4 here >
< Insert Figure 4 here >
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4. General Discussion
The main goal of the present study was to investigate how the degree of orthographic
overlap between translation equivalents influenced bilingual word recognition processes at
different stages of reading development, in order to better understand how bilingual lexical
organization changes over the course of bilingual reading consolidation. We tested 100 Spanish-
Basque bilinguals of different ages in two translation recognition tasks (Spanish-to-Basque
translation direction and Basque-to-Spanish translation direction). Results showed a general
modulation of reading performance as a function of reading development. The younger the
participants were, the slower the translation recognition process. In addition, and more
importantly for the focus of this study, the results showed that the degree of orthographic overlap
between translation equivalents helped bilingual translation recognition and, critically, that this
cognate effect progressively diminished with age.
Results showed that the response latencies to translation equivalents decreased with age.
Hence, we observed a general modulation of bilinguals’ ability to recognize translation
equivalents that is related to their general reading skills and to their stage of reading
development. These general results from the translation recognition task are in line with evidence
from monolingual samples showing that general reading skills get progressively tuned and
consolidated during the transition from childhood to adolescence (see Grainger et al., 2012). It is
well known that at the early stages of reading development several factors play an important role
and affect the variability observed in children’s proficiency while reading (e.g., general cognitive
development, working memory capacity, general intelligence, exposure to print at home, etc.)
and that this variability tends to diminish by the end of elementary education (Coombe, 2010;
Ellis, 1996; Folse, 2004; Nation, 1990, 2001, 2006; Papagno & Vallar, 1995; Service, 1992).
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Critically, response latencies were modulated by the degree of orthographic overlap
between translation equivalents, showing that along the continuum of cognate status, cognate
words were recognized faster than non-cognate words (see Figure 2). The degree of orthographic
overlap between translation equivalents is a critical aiding factor during the bilingual word
recognition process, as shown by multiple studies demonstrating facilitation effects for cognates
over non-cognates using different tasks and paradigms (e.g., Boada et al., 2013; De Groot &
Comijs, 1995; De Groot, Dannenburg, & Van Hell, 1994; Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010).
In the current study we replicated this cognate advantage in the translation recognition task using
a continuous measure of the degree of cross-linguistic orthographic overlap (based on the
length002Dcorrected Levenshtein distance; see Casaponsa et al., 2015; Duñabeitia et al., 2013;
Schepens et al., 2011; see also Prior, Kroll, & MacWhinney, 2013, for an alternative approach).
The present experiment adds to that evidence by showing a general cognate facilitation effect
that increases as a direct function of the degree of orthographic overlap between translation
equivalents. Participants’ response latencies decreased as the orthographic similarity between the
translation equivalents increased.
Even though all participants had already acquired basic reading skills and were proficient
in both of their languages, there was a clear-cut gradation of the degree of automation and
consolidation of the bilingual visual word recognition processes as a function of age. In this line,
results showed a significantly better performance in the translation recognition task for older
than for younger participants (i.e., shorter response latencies). Moreover, this pattern was
replicated in both language translation directions (Spanish-to-Basque and Basque-to-Spanish).
While the effect of age was significantly stronger in the Spanish-to-Basque translation direction
than in the Basque-to-Spanish translation direction, the magnitude of the effect of cognate rate
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was not modulated by the translation direction. In other words, the direction of the translation
recognition process had little impact on the observed decreasing pattern of cognate effects across
age. This is not such a surprising finding, considering that in simultaneous balanced bilinguals a
straightforward L1-L2 division cannot be made at the level of proficiency, given that they are
equally proficient in both languages. Their languages are in that sense better characterized as
multiple L1s (see Duñabeitia, Dimitropoulou, Uribe-Etxebarria, Laka, & Carreiras, 2010;
Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010; Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008).
More importantly, the effect of orthographic overlap between translation equivalents was
modulated by the age of the bilingual participants. The younger the children were, the greater
facilitation effects along the cognate status continuum were found, and these results were
replicated in both translation directions. Furthermore, an analysis of the data using z-scores in
order to control for the fact that younger children were much slower on the task than older
participants showed that these results did not depend on the general speed of response. These
results suggest that less proficient readers are more responsive to and reliant on cross-language
orthographic overlapping features than more experienced readers, and that they benefit more
from these types of cues during bilingual word recognition. Hence, these results demonstrate that
cognate effects are not only maximal at lower levels of L2 proficiency (see Bultena et al., 2014),
but also at lower levels of reading skills, even when the participants tested are highly proficient
in the two languages at test. (Note in this regard that all bilinguals tested in the current study
attended a bilingual school and had acquired reading in both languages simultaneously). This is
in line with the evidence suggesting that the orthographic characteristics of words play an
important role during word processing in young children (e.g., Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998;
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Grainger & Ziegler, 2011; Grainger et al., 2012; Ziegler et al., 2014), and extends this finding to
bilingual word processing.
The present results complement a recent observation from a word production study by
Poarch and van Hell (2012) testing bilingual children’s sensitivity to the cognate status of words
by extending those results to the visual word recognition domain suggesting that the cognate
effects diminish as an inverse function of age in translation recognition tasks. The highly
proficient non-balanced bilingual samples tested by Poarch and van Hell in their picture naming
study displayed significant cognate effects in both their L1 and L2, and critically, the magnitude
of the cognate effects was found to be much larger (specifically, two times larger) for children
with a mean age of 7.28 years than for young adults with a mean age of 24.4 years. (Note,
however, that Poarch and van Hell did not directly statistically compare the magnitude of the
cognate effects across the ages). Hence, the present study extends those findings by
demonstrating that sensitivity to cross-language orthographic overlap diminishes with age in
highly proficient bilinguals in a language comprehension task. In a related vein, it is worth
noting that in a bilingual language comprehension study using the lexical decision task with
young Dutch learners of English, Brenders et al. (2011) also showed significant cognate effects
in the L2 (but not in the L1) for three groups of relatively proficient non-balanced bilingual
children (mean ages of 10.5, 12.6 and 14.3 years). However, and in partial contrast to the present
results, the interaction between cognate status and group did not result significant in the study by
Brenders et al., thus suggesting that the cognate effects remained relatively constant across ages.
Nonetheless, there are sufficient reasons to believe that the present results and those reported by
Brenders et al. are not at odds. Leaving aside the differences in the tasks at stake (lexical
decision vs. translation recognition), in the present study we tested highly proficient bilingual
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22
children from different ages immersed in a bilingual community and who were attending a
bilingual school where the two active languages (Spanish and Basque) are used a similar amount
of time, while Brenders and colleagues tested a completely different group of bilinguals with
much more limited exposure to their L2 (i.e., they were native Dutch children living in
monolingual Dutch families, and they had been exposed to English as a second language only in
the academic context). Besides, the amount of exposure to English as a second language of the
children tested in the Brenders et al. study largely varied across groups (i.e., 5 months for the
younger group, and 3 and 5 years for the two older groups, respectively), thus making a direct
comparison between the two cohorts difficult.
Which are the mechanisms responsible for the developmental changes in the cognate
effects observed in the current study? The first approach interpreting the finding of the cognate
effects’ diminution as a function of age relies on the different reading skills (i.e., reading
expertise) of the participants tested. Our bilingual children’s two languages are essentially
transparent, in that there are relatively unambiguous grapheme-phoneme correspondences that
are shared across Basque and Spanish. Relatedly, developmental studies on reading acquisition
and consolidation in multiple languages suggest that inexperienced readers of orthographically
consistent languages strongly rely on recoding strategies based on small ortho-phonological units
(i.e., the psycholinguistic grain size theory; see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005, 2006), and that larger
size units are used once reading has been consolidated. Hence, according to these premises, we
tentatively interpret the larger cognate effects observed during translation recognition for
younger rather than for older participants as a consequence of the greater reliance of the former
on sub-lexical units, which in the case of cognate translations are shared across languages, thus
speeding up the recognition process. The shared (language-independent) nature of sub-lexical
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23
orthographic and phonological units that we assume here is in line with preceding studies on
biscriptal readers suggesting that graphemes and phonemes that are identical across languages or
scripts (with identical spelling-sound correspondences) are integrated in a single orthographic
lexicon (see Dimitropoulou, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2011c; Havelka & Rastle, 2005). In
contrast, and as suggested by Ziegler and Goswami (2006), consolidation of reading skills
involves a lesser degree of reliance on sub-lexical cues during visual word identification, and this
could partially explain why older bilinguals exhibit reduced cognate effects (see also Acha &
Perea, 2008, and Kohnert, 2010). In a related vein, studies exploring similarities and differences
in the magnitude of cognate effects between young and older bilingual adults have also
suggested a critical modulation of cross-language interactions as a function of age. It has been
proposed that “lexical access in older bilinguals may be detrimentally affected by the form
similarity of cognate translations” (Siyambalapitiya, Chenery, & Copland, 2009, p. 548), in line
with previous research demonstrating that the reliance on form similarity between competing
lexical forms dramatically changes as a function of age (see Logan & Balota, 2003), so that the
cognate effects can vanish (and even go in the opposite direction) in the elderly.
Developmental models of bilingual lexical access have proposed that lateral inhibition
processes that are responsible for the management of cross-language interactions are
strengthened as a function of experience (see BIA-d model, Grainger et al., 2010). Following the
rationale of the Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA; Grainger & Dijkstra, 1992; van
Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998), the BIA-d model assumes that at the initial stages of visual
word recognition, lexical access is non-selective, and language-specific representations are
accessed “due to the conjoint operation of top-down and lateral inhibitory mechanisms”
(Grainger et al., 2010, p. 271). According to this model, the excitatory connections between
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24
translation equivalents are initially enhanced in the presence of orthographic overlap (thus
explaining the cognate facilitation effect), but it is predicted that these excitatory connections
decay rapidly as proficiency increases, as an inverse function of the development of top-down
regulatory mechanisms from the corresponding language nodes and of the development of lateral
inhibitory connections between formally overlapping words in the two languages. Hence, the
BIA-d model suggests that the strength of the connections between translation equivalents, and
especially between orthographically similar translations, is reduced due to the development of
lateral and top-down inhibitory connections (Grainger et al., 2010; see also Casaponsa et al.,
2015). Hence, one could interpret the current findings based on the different interference
suppression skills of younger and older bilingual children, as suggested by the BIA-d model.
While it is true that bilingual children master interference suppression in order to deal with the
words from one of their two languages with minimal intrusions from the other language (see
Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008, for review), the attentional mechanisms supposedly responsible
for such language control are not rigidly set during early childhood as they are in continuous
development during infancy (e.g., Antón et al., 2014; Rueda et al., 2004). It could be
hypothesized that younger children show greater cross-language similarity effects than older
children as a consequence of their still immature language control system (yielding impoverished
top-down regulatory activity from the language nodes and lateral inhibitory regulation at the
lexical level), which makes them more sensitive to cross-language interference effects (here
measured by the cognate status of words). While the current results fit well along the lines
sketched in the BIA-d model, we acknowledge that this model was initially intended to account
for bilingual lexical access in late learners of a second language. Hence, the future revised
versions of this developmental model should also incorporate predictions regarding the way in
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25
which access to the bilingual lexicon is differently mediated by bottom-up and top-down
regulatory factors as a function of age in relatively balanced and simultaneous bilinguals.
Together, these results demonstrate that the consolidation of the bilingual orthographic
lexicon follows a developmental trajectory during childhood that is initially governed by a
greater reliance on cross-language similarity possibly due to the still immature bilingual
language control system of novice readers. Once bilingual reading becomes automatic as a
function of increased exposure to print and once the attentional mechanisms responsible for
cross-language interference suppression are fully set and developed, bilinguals’ sensitivity to
competing neighboring orthographic representations decays, leading to the progressive
diminishing of the cognate effects observed in the current study.
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26
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Tables
Table 1. Main effects and interactions of the predictors of interest of the full model (Type-3 F-
tests using Satterthwaite denominator degrees of freedom approximations)
F-value
p-value
Cognate rate
136.5
<.001
Age
29.0
<.001
Direction
19.5
<.001
Cognate rate || Age
6.3
.01
Cognate rate || Direction
1.0
.39
Age || Direction
7.2
.001
Cognate rate || Age || Direction
.4
.51
!
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40
Table 2. Coefficients of the fixed effects together with standard errors and t-values.
Estimate
Std. Error
t-value
(Intercept)
1145
25
45.92
***
Cognate rate
-418
22
-18.62
***
Age
-87
10
-9.14
***
Direction
-87
13
-6.70
***
Trial order
-.05
-.01
-11.24
***
Session order
7
20
.39
PreviousResponse
.14
.01
-56.58
***
Cognate rate||Age
41
7
5.30
***
Cognate rate||Direction
36
28
1.29
Age||Direction
9
2
3.71
***
Cognate rate||Age||Direction
-6
9
-.66
Note. All flagged t-values are significant at the p<.001 level.
The reference value for translation direction is Spanish-to-Basque.
!
!
!
41
Table 3. Main effects and interactions of the predictors of interest of the full model for the
transformed data using z-scores (Type-III F-tests using Satterthwaite denominator degrees of
freedom approximations).
F-value
p-value
Cognate rate
1245.3
<.001
Age
42.2
<.001
Direction
.1
.72
Cognate rate || Age
13.7
<.001
!
!
!
42
Table 4. Coefficients of the fixed effects together with standard errors and t-values for the model
for the transformed data using z-scores.
Estimate
Std. Error
t-value
(Intercept)
.56
.02
45.92
***
Cognate rate
-1.03
.03
-35.30
***
Age
-.02
.003
-6.50
***
Direction
.003
.02
.36
Trial order
-.001
.001
-10.50
***
Session order
.01
.006
1.53
PreviousResponse
.12
.002
48.45
***
Cognate rate||Age
.02
.005
3.70
***
Note. All flagged t-values are significant at the p<.001 level.
The reference value for translation direction is Spanish-to-Basque.
!
!
!
43
Figures
Figure 1. a) Distribution of participants per age. b) Distribution of items along the cognate
continuum.
!
!
!
44
Figure 2. Schematic representation of a trial.
!
!
!
45
Figure 3. a) Estimated RTs for the continuous predictor Age for each translation direction (the
predictor Age is represented mean-centered). b) Estimated RTs in the Spanish-to-Basque
translation direction as a function of Age and Cognate Rate. c) Estimated RTs in the Basque-to-
Spanish translation direction as a function of Age and Cognate Rate. Cognate status refers to the
orthographic overlap between translation equivalents as measured by the length-corrected
Levenshtein distance (continuous predictor where 1 corresponds to fully-overlapping words).
The continuous predictor Age is plotted (for illustration purposes only) so that each colored line
represents a unique set of age (from 8 to 15).
!
!
!
46
Figure 4. a) Estimated z-scores in the Spanish-to-Basque translation direction as a function of
Age and Cognate Rate. b) Estimated z-scores in the Basque-to-Spanish translation direction as a
function of Age and Cognate Rate.
