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Category: Project

Description: Despite a wealth of research showing the influences of shared orthography and semantics on cognate recognition in bilinguals, less attention has been paid to the potential role of phonology. Additionally, most of the limited studies examining the influence of phonological similarity on cognate recognition have been conducted in alphabetic orthographies, such as English, Spanish, and Dutch (Carrasco-Ortiz et al., 2021; Dijkstra et al., 1999, 2010; Frances et al., 2021), and their findings were mixed. To address these issues, we will examine the influence of phonological similarity on cognate recognition among bilinguals of two logographic orthographies, Cantonese (L1) and Japanese Kanji (L2). Based on the BIA+ model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002), we predict that phonological similarity will facilitate cognate recognition in L2 lexical decision. This finding will aid our understanding of the particular role of phonology in cognate recognition in Cantonese-Japanese bilinguals.