Abstract
We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We quantitatively analyze non-native lexical choice, highlighting cognate facilitation as one of the important phenomena shaping the language of non-native speakers.- Anthology ID:
- Q18-1024
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6
- Month:
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Editors:
- Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Kristina Toutanova, Brian Roark
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 329–342
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/Q18-1024
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00024
- Cite (ACL):
- Ella Rabinovich, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Shuly Wintner. 2018. Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6:329–342.
- Cite (Informal):
- Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice (Rabinovich et al., TACL 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/Q18-1024.pdf
- Code
- ellarabi/reddit-l2