Het cognaatfacilitatie-effect in schriftelijke woordproductie van Nederlands-Engelse middelbare scholieren

Abstract

This research explores whether or not a cognate facilitation effect occurs in a L1 to L2 direction translation task in unbalanced Dutch-English high school students in the age category of 16-17 years old. Also, influence of the degree of orthografic similarity between translation pairs and the L2 proficiency of participants as determined by the LexTale (Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012), were investigated as possible influencal factors on the cognate facilitation effect. Forty-four pupils from the same high school and in the same grade participated in the study. After completing the LexTale test, they were asked to translate a list of 60 words from their L1 Dutch to their L2 English. The list consisted of 20 identical cognates, 20 non-identical cognates and 20 non-cognates which functioned as control words. Results show that pupils significantly scored better on identical cognates than on non-identical cognates and control words. The L2 proficiency of participants correlated with their performance on all words in general, but showed no difference per cognate category.