Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice
This addresses the issue of understanding language transfer effects for linguists and language learners, though it is incremental in applying computational methods to a known phenomenon.
The study tackled the problem of how native language cognates influence second language lexical choice, showing that non-native English speakers' word choices are significantly affected by cognates, enabling reconstruction of the Indo-European language tree from lexical frequencies.
We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We quantitatively analyze non-native lexical choice, highlighting cognate facilitation as one of the important phenomena shaping the language of non-native speakers.