What is it about?
Dual-language learners, when matching labels to pictures in English, were affected by their knowledge of Spanish. Specifically, words that shared form and meaning in both languages (cognates like train/tren) were processed more quickly and accurately, and those that shared form but not meaning (like "pan," which means bread in Spanish) were processed more slowly and less accurately.
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Why is it important?
There's a lot of research showing similar effects in bilingual adults and bilingually-educated children. This appears to be the first study to show this kind of cross-linguistic influence in children receiving formal education in only one language (English).
Perspectives
The influence of an English word's similarity to Spanish has practical ramifications for working with dual-language learner children as well as theoretical implications for models of bilingual language processing.
Darin Woolpert
University of Vermont
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cognate Facilitation and False-Friend Inhibition in Spanish-Speaking Dual-Language Learners' Lexical Processing of English, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, February 2026, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2025_persp-25-00080.
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