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The Cognate Facilitation Effect
The cognate facilitation effect describes a phenomenon where bilinguals process cognate words faster than non-cognate words. Cognate words are words that sometimes overlap in origin, sound, spelling and meaning across languages. Their opposite, non-cognate words, do not have overlap in origin, sound, spelling or meaning across languages. The cognate facilitation effect occurs because of the overlap found exclusively in cognate words. This overlap makes it so that one concept is represented twice in similar forms within a bilingual’s mental representation of words, known as the bilingual mental lexicon. When bilinguals encounter cognate and non-cognate words, there is a greater activation of the cognate words in the bilingual mental lexicon. This increase in activation for cognate words leads to quicker access to these words. Given that non-cognate words do not have this overlap and do not benefit from this fast lexical access, bilinguals access cognate words faster than non-cognates words from their mental lexicon.

For example, when accessing the English word banana, its French translation, banane, would also become and remain activated for a long period of time due to the strong connections between the two cognate words. When accessing the English world apple, it’s French equivalent, pomme, would not activate in the same way within the mental lexicon. This is because these two non-cognates are only connected by their shared meaning. This results in less interference between the two translations, which explains why bilinguals respond quicker to cognates than non-cognate, as defined in the cognate facilitation effect.

Evidence for the cognate facilitation effect comes from psycholinguistic research. Researchers have found that bilinguals respond to cognates faster than non-cognates. Studies using reading tasks have found that when bilinguals read cognate and non-cognate words, they processed cognates faster than non-cognates. This was indicated by a button press once the individual was finished reading. These findings support the cognate facilitation effect; that bilinguals process cognates faster than non-cognates. Studies conducted with brain imaging indicate that the activity of a bilingual brain differs when processing cognates and non-cognates. The cognate facilitation effect is used in psycholinguistic research because it can be used to study the architecture of the bilingual mental lexicon. Specifically, the cognate facilitation effect is taken as evidence that translations in different languages associated to a single concept are stored and accessed together in the bilingual mental lexicon. It also serves as evidence that during lexical access, both languages co-activate and interact simultaneously within a bilingual’s mental lexicon whenever they must use language. The idea behind this is that if responses to these special cognate words differ from non-cognate words, this can be taken as evidence that both known languages affect each other within the bilingual mind. Studying the cognate facilitation effect gives us an inside look into the ways that bilinguals store and access their known words.