Work

Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice

Year: 2018

Type: article

Abstract: 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.

Source: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00024

Authors: Ella Rabinovich, Yulia Tsvetkov, Shuly Wintner

Institutions: IBM (United States), University of Haifa, Carnegie Mellon University

Language: English

Topic: Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: RI: Small: Modeling Lexical Borrowing to Bridge the "Linguistic Divide" in Natural Language Processing