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Article published In: The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 18:1 (2023) ► pp.151–175

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The cognate continuum

Approaches to empirically establishing form overlap

ORCiD logo with link | Albert Einstein College of Medicine
 | CUNY Graduate Center
 | Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
 | University of Oslo
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.22018.str
Abstract
Cognates, words that are similar in form and meaning across two languages, form compelling test cases for bilingual access and representation. Overwhelmingly, cognate pairs are subjectively selected in a categorical either- or manner, often with criteria and modality unspecified. Yet the few studies that take a more nuanced approach, selecting cognate pairs along a continuum of overlap, show interesting, albeit somewhat divergent results. This study compares three measures that quantify cognateness continuously to obtain modality-specific cognate scores for the same set of Norwegian-English word-translation pairs: (1) Researcher Intuitions – bilingual researchers rate the degree of overlap between the paired words, (2) Levenshtein Distance – an algorithm that computes overlap between word pairs, and (3) Translation Elicitation – English-speaking monolinguals guess what Norwegian words mean. Results demonstrate that cognateness can be ranked on a continuum and reveal measure and modality-specific effects. Orthographic presentation yields higher cognateness status than auditory presentation overall. Though all three measures intercorrelated moderately to highly, Researcher Intuitions demonstrated a bimodal distribution, yielding scores on the high and low end of the spectrum, consistent with the common categorical approach in the field. Levenshtein Distance would be preferred for fine-grained distinctions along the continuum of form overlap.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The present study
  • Methods
    • Materials
    • Researcher intuitions
    • Levenshtein Distance
    • Translation Elicitation
  • Analysis
    • Translation Elicitation Coding
  • Results
    • Descriptive statistics
    • Comparison of measures
    • Continuous or categorical?
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
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