Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that native language cognates significantly influence second language lexical choices, enabling the reconstruction of language phylogenies from non-native English speech data.

Contribution

It introduces a large corpus and computational methods to quantify cognate effects on non-native lexical selection, revealing their impact on language use.

Findings

Cognate effects significantly shape non-native lexical choices

Lexical frequency patterns can reconstruct Indo-European language phylogeny

Cognate facilitation is a key factor in non-native language production

Abstract

We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We quantitatively analyze non-native lexical choice, highlighting cognate facilitation as one of the important phenomena shaping the language of non-native speakers.