TY - GEN
T1 - Cumulative frequency can explain cognate facilitation in language models
AU - Winther, Irene
AU - Matusevych, Yevgen
AU - Pickering, Martin J.
N1 - This work was supported in part by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing, funded by the UKRI (grant EP/S022481/1) and the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics and School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Cognates – words which share form and meaning across two languages – have been extensively studied to understand the bilingual mental lexicon. One consistent finding is that bilingual speakers process cognates faster than non-cognates, an effect known as cognate facilitation. Yet, there is no agreement on the underlying factors driving this effect. In this paper, we use computational modeling to test whether the effect can be explained by the cumulative frequency hypothesis. We train a computational language model on two language pairs (Dutch–English, Norwegian–English) under different conditions of input presentation and test it on sentence stimuli from two existing studies with bilingual speakers of those languages. We find that our model can exhibit a cognate effect, lending support to the cumulative frequency hypothesis. Further analyses reveal that thesize of the effect in the model depends on its linguistic accuracy. We interpret our results within the literature on cognate processing.
AB - Cognates – words which share form and meaning across two languages – have been extensively studied to understand the bilingual mental lexicon. One consistent finding is that bilingual speakers process cognates faster than non-cognates, an effect known as cognate facilitation. Yet, there is no agreement on the underlying factors driving this effect. In this paper, we use computational modeling to test whether the effect can be explained by the cumulative frequency hypothesis. We train a computational language model on two language pairs (Dutch–English, Norwegian–English) under different conditions of input presentation and test it on sentence stimuli from two existing studies with bilingual speakers of those languages. We find that our model can exhibit a cognate effect, lending support to the cumulative frequency hypothesis. Further analyses reveal that thesize of the effect in the model depends on its linguistic accuracy. We interpret our results within the literature on cognate processing.
KW - cognate facilitation effect
KW - cumulative frequency
KW - bilingualism
KW - language model
KW - sentence processing
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781713835257
VL - 43
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
SP - 2513
EP - 2519
BT - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021
Y2 - 26 July 2021 through 29 July 2021
ER -