Factors influencing cognate performance (Squires et al., 2020)

<b>Purpose:</b> The purpose of this systematic review was to determine evidence of a cognate effect for young multilingual children (ages 3;0–8;11 [years;months], preschool to second grade) in terms of task-level and child-level factors that may influence cognate performance. Cognates are pairs of vocabulary words that share meaning with similar phonology and/or orthography in more than one language, such as <i>rose–rosa</i> (English–Spanish) or <i>carrot–carotte </i>(English–French). Despite the cognate advantage noted with older bilingual children and bilingual adults, there has been no systematic examination of the cognate research in young multilingual children.<b>Method: </b>We conducted searches of multiple electronic databases and hand-searched article bibliographies for studies that examined young multilingual children’s performance with cognates based on study inclusion criteria aligned to the research questions.<b>Results: </b>The review yielded 16 articles. The majority of the studies (12/16, 75%) demonstrated a positive cognate effect for young multilingual children (measured in higher accuracy, faster reaction times, and doublet translation equivalents on cognates as compared to noncognates). However, not all bilingual children demonstrated a cognate effect. Both task-level factors (cognate definition, type of cognate task, word characteristics) and child-level factors (level of bilingualism, age) appear to influence young bilingual children’s performance on cognates.<b>Conclusions:</b> Contrary to early 1990s research, current researchers suggest that even young multilingual children may demonstrate sensitivity to cognate vocabulary words. Given the limits in study quality, more high-quality research is needed, particularly to address test validity in cognate assessments, to develop appropriate cognate definitions for children, and to refine word-level features. Only one study included a brief instruction prior to assessment, warranting cognate treatment studies as an area of future need.<br><b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>PRISMA checklist. <br>Squires, L. R., Ohlfest, S. J., Santoro, K. E., &amp; Roberts, J. L. (2020). Factors influencing cognate performance for young multilingual children's vocabulary: A research synthesis. <i>American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. </i>https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00167