2007/05/23

Costa, A., Caramazza, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (2000). The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(5), 1283–1296.

Presentation: Chris
Summary: Shelly

The aim of the study is to examine lexical access in speech production. Two models have been proposed regarding this issue, the Discrete Serial Model and the Cascade Activation Model. In the Discrete Serial Model, only the selected lexical node would send activation to the phonological layer. However, the Cascade Activation Model considered all lexical nodes activated through the semantic system spread some proportional activation to their corresponding phonological segments, regardless of whether they are selected. To see which model is at work, two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 used a picture naming task to test the effect of cognate for Spanish monolinguals and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals whose dominant language is Catalan. The subjects were asked to name the pictures in Spanish. The results showed that cognate stimuli would facilitate the bilinguals in naming pictures, implying that the corresponding cognates in Catalan, even though not selected for production, would send activation to the phonological level, and such a facilitation effect was not found in monolinguals. Experiment 2 tested Spanish-Catalan proficient bilinguals with Spanish as the dominant language by using the same paradigm as in Experiment 1, and the results showed that the cognate effect was smaller that that in Experiment 1, implying that the activation of both languages would appear in the phonological layer, and more suppression would be needed when the responding language is the dominant language, so the cognate effect is smaller. The results in both Experiment 1 and 2 support the Cascade Activation Model, demonstrating that the nonselected lexical nodes would also send activation to the phonological layer.