Orthographic Transparency and Morphology of Spanish–English Cognate Adjectives

Abstract

The English and Spanish languages share over 20,000 cognates. Cognates are words that are orthographically, semantically, and syntactically similar in two languages. In 2009, Montelongo, Hernández, and Herter collected orthographic transparency ratings for over 2,000 Spanish–English cognate nouns and cognate adjectives drawn from the Juilland and Chang-Rodríguez’ Frequency Dictionary of Spanish Words. The present analysis of the cognate adjectives in the Montelongo, et al. norms identified orthographic and morphological characteristics which affected ratings of cognate transparency. The analysis identified an initial-letter effect: the earlier an English word deviates from its Spanish equivalent, the lower it is rated. Similarly, the more orthographically similar an English suffix is to its Spanish suffix equivalent, the higher its rating.