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Updated: Jul 20, 2026

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
The cognate facilitation effect: implications for models of lexical access
A Costa1, A Caramazza, N Sebastian-Galles
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
Do nonselected lexical nodes activate their phonological information? Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were asked to name (a) pictures whose names are cognates in the 2 languages (words that are phonologically similar in the 2 languages) and (b) pictures whose names are noncognates in the 2 languages. If nonselected lexical nodes are phonologically encoded, naming latencies should be shorter for cognate words, and because the cognate status of words is only meaningful for bilingual speakers, this difference should disappear when testing monolingual speakers. The results of Experiment 1 fully supported these predictions. In Experiment 2, the difference between cognate and noncognate words was larger when naming in the nondominant language than when naming in the dominant language. The results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as providing support to cascaded activation models of lexical access.
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