THE EFFECT OF COGNATE WORDS ON LEXICAL ACCESS OF ENGLISH AS A THIRD LANGUAGE

Abstract In this paper, the results of an experimental study carried out in order to investigate the effect of triple cognates in the lexical access of speakers of English (L3), German (L2), and Brazilian Portuguese (L1) is presented. Participants performed a reading task, containing 60 experimental sentences with the following critical words: triple cognates, double cognates between Brazilian Portuguese and English, and double cognates between German and English. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they performed the task. The measures of first fixation and first reading pass times were analyzed. The results suggested that triple cognates were processed faster than their respective controls in first fixation (M: 264/311ms (cognate/control); p=0,03) and first pass (M: 407/448ms (cognate/control); p=0,05), which was interpreted as evidence of a nonselective lexical access and an integrated lexicon for the multilinguals’ languages. In addition, these results contribute to the literature of lexical access of multilinguals, favoring the view that all the languages of a multilingual are active even when the speaker intends to use only one language.