Abstract
Abstract
We examined the extent to which cognate facilitation effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s
production and comprehension and how these were modulated by language dominance and language context. Bilingual Dutch-German
children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to German-dominant, performed picture naming and auditory lexical decision tasks in
single-language and dual-language contexts. Language context was manipulated with respect to the language of communication (with
the experimenter and in instructional videos) and by means of proficiency tasks. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both
production and comprehension and interacted with both dominance and context. In a single-language context, stronger cognate
facilitation effects were found for picture naming in children’s less dominant language, in line with previous studies on
individual differences in lexical activation. In the dual-language context, this pattern was reversed, suggesting inhibition of
the dominant language at the decision level. Similar effects were observed in lexical decision. These findings provide evidence
for an integrated bilingual lexicon in simultaneous bilingual children and shed more light on the complex interplay between
lexicon-internal and lexicon-external factors modulating the extent of lexical cross-linguistic influence more generally.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics