Author
Listed:
- Bryan L. White
- Michael C. Hout
- José Montelongo
- Anita Hernández
- Francisco Serrano-Wall
Abstract
Cognates are orthographically, semantically, and syntactically identical (or similar) words in two languages. The English and Spanish languages share more than 20,000 cognates, and many are essential academic vocabulary. Research has shown that cognates facilitate vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension for language learners (when compared to non-cognate words). In Experiment 1, orthographic transparency ratings for 440 English-Spanish cognate nouns drawn from the Paivio et al. imagery norms were collected from 41 college students. Our participants were presented with lists of English-Spanish cognate word pairs presented side-by-side and were asked to rate the orthographic similarity of the pairs on a Likert scale of 1 to 7. The analysis of the ratings suggests that the earlier an English word deviates from its Spanish equivalent (its “point of differentiation†), the lower the cognate transparency rating it is assigned (extending the generalizability of the “initial letter effect†previously reported). In Experiment 2, we validated these ratings by having 43 new participants quickly judge whether English-Spanish word pairs were or were not cognates. We found that reaction times were strongly correlated with transparency ratings and the points of differentiation, supporting the usefulness of the transparency ratings obtained in Experiment 1. A limitation of Experiment 1 was that the cognate pairs varied only by page number, and the individual cognate pairs were not ordered differently. Additionally, we recommend a larger participant sample to include persons other than college students.
Suggested Citation
Bryan L. White & Michael C. Hout & José Montelongo & Anita Hernández & Francisco Serrano-Wall, 2024.
"English-Spanish Cognates in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan Imagery Norms Rated for Orthographic Transparency,"
SAGE Open, , vol. 14(4), pages 21582440241, November.
Handle:
RePEc:sae:sagope:v:14:y:2024:i:4:p:21582440241300494
DOI: 10.1177/21582440241300494
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:sagope:v:14:y:2024:i:4:p:21582440241300494. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.