Cognate facilitation in different-script trilinguals as a function of task demands.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Cognate facilitation, the enhanced processing of related words across languages, is well-documented in bilinguals.
• Understanding cross-linguistic influence in trilinguals, especially concerning cognates in the third language (L3), is crucial for language acquisition theories.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how Arabic-Hebrew-English trilinguals process double and triple cognates in their L3.
• To determine if cognate facilitation effects are consistent across different experimental tasks in trilinguals.

Main Methods:

• Employed three experiments: a semantic relatedness task, a lexical decision task, and a sentence reading eye-tracking task.
• Used identical cognate stimuli across all tasks for Arabic-Hebrew-English trilingual participants.

Main Results:

• A significant cognate facilitation effect was found in the semantic relatedness task, indicating activation of both L1 and L2.
• No cognate facilitation was observed in the lexical decision or sentence reading tasks.
• Facilitation magnitude did not differ significantly between double and triple cognates in the semantic task.

Conclusions:

• Cognate facilitation in trilingual L3 processing is task-dependent, influenced by factors like meaning activation, context availability, and orthographic cues.
• The study extends findings on phonologically mediated cross-language activation from bilinguals to trilinguals.