lexical acquisition, vocabulary, bilingualism, item response theory, bayesian
Cognate beginnings to bilingual lexical acquisition
| Link | Contents |
|---|---|
| Website | Instructions for reproducibility, data dictionaries, lab notes |
| PsyArxiv | Preprint and figures |
| GitHub | Code, preprint and figures |
| OSF | Code, preprint, and results (model outputs) |
| Docker | Docker image with reproducible RStudio session |
Repository structure and files đź“‚
This repository is organised as follows:
- data: processed data in CSV format
- items.csv: information about words included in the analyses
- participants.csv: information about participants
- responses.csv: participant responses to the items. The model was fit on this dataset.
- data-raw: raw data from the Barcelona Vocabulary Questionnaire, BVQ. This is a RDS file containing a list of data frames with all the information necessary to generate the datasets in the data/ directory.
- docs: source code to generate the documentation site of the project (cognate-beginnings).
- manuscript: Quarto document with the source code of the manuscript and appendix
- R: R functions used in the targets to process and analyse the data.
- processing.R: code that preprocesses the raw data to generate
data/participants.csv,data/items.csv, anddata/responses.csv - models.R: to fit the Bayesian model and extract posterior draws
- utils.R: helper functions and wrappers used across in processing.R and models.R
- processing.R: code that preprocesses the raw data to generate
- renv: internal settings to ensure reproducibility of the computing environment.
- results: model outputs. You will need to run the code to generate the files that will be contained in this directory.
- fits: RDS files with the brmsfit of the Bayesian models
- posterior: CSV files with the posterior draws of the population-level and group-level coefficients
- predictions: CSV files with the posterior predictions
- src: R functions to make programming tasks easier, not needed to reproduce the project.
- tests: testthat scripts used to unit test the functions used across the project.
Abstract
Recent studies suggest that cognateness boosts bilingual lexical acquisition. This study proposes an account in which language co-activation accelerates accumulation of word-learning instances across languages. This account predicts a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language than in the higher-exposure language, as the former receive co-activation from their translations more frequently. Bayesian Item Response Theory was used to model acquisition trajectories for 604 Catalan-Spanish translations from a dataset of 366 12-32 month-old bilinguals (M=22.23 months, 175 female, mainly White, collected 2020-2022). Results show a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language (d=0.276), than for words in the higher-exposure language (d=0.022), supporting a language exposure-moderated account for the effect of cognateness on lexical acquisition.
Acknowledgements
The authors declare no conflicts of interest with regard to the funding source of this study. This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation and State Research Agency (Project PID2021- 123416NB-I00 financed by MCIN/ AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 / FEDER, UE) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (ES/S010947/1, UK). GGC was supported by a FPI research contract (PRE2019-088165). DAV was supported by the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation program under Marie SkĹ‚odowska–Curie Grant (765556) and partially supported by Portuguese national funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology, under project UIDB/00214/2020, awarded to the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon. IC was supported by the Investigo program funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU (NGEU) recovery plan. NSG was supported by an ICREA Academia 2019 award from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). We are grateful to Chiara Santolin, Ege E. Ă–zer, and the rest of the Speech Acquisition and Perception research group, and to Alicia Franco-MartĂnez and Cristina RodrĂguez-Prada, for their helpful feedback. We thank Xavier Mayoral, Silvia Blanch, and Cristina Cuadrado for their technical support, and Cristina Dominguez and Katia Pistrin for their efforts in recruiting infants. We also thank all families and infants who participated in the experiments. This study was conducted according to guidelines laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki, and was approved by the Drug Research Ethical Committee (CEIm) of the IMIM Parc de Salut Mar, reference 2020/9080/I. The data and code necessary to reproduce the analyses presented here are publicly accessible, as are the materials necessary to attempt to replicate the findings. The analyses presented here were not preregistered. Data, code, and materials for this research are available at the following URLs: https://osf.io/hy984/, https://github.com/gongcastro/cognate-beginnings.