Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2018 / Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice

Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice

Paper · 2018 · Ella Rabinovich, Yulia Tsvetkov and Shuly Wintner

Summary

Psycholinguistic research suggests that bilinguals favor second-language words that resemble equivalents in their mother tongue (cognate facilitation). Most of that evidence, however, comes from small laboratory studies with few participants, few words and artificial tasks. Rabinovich, Tsvetkov and Wintner test the effect at scale on spontaneous writing by fluent non-native English users.

They build L2-Reddit from posts in Europe-oriented subreddits, where users declare their country through a flair. They then add each user's full Reddit history from 2005–2017, so every sentence carries a country label that serves as a proxy for L1.

Next, they assemble a focus set of over 1,000 frequent, culturally neutral words whose English synonyms have different etymological origins. They compare how authors from 31 Indo-European-speaking countries choose among these synonyms. The choices vary systematically with native language. The signal is strong enough to identify an author's L1 and to reconstruct the Indo-European phylogenetic tree from word choice alone.

The work delivers a large resource of advanced non-native English and corpus-scale evidence for cognate effects.

Key points

  • L2-Reddit corpus: about 250M sentences (3.8B tokens) from 45K+ users across 80K+ subreddits. Of 489 raw flairs, 50 countries were manually derived, and every sentence is annotated with its author's country.
  • Language scope: analysis covers 31 countries with Indo-European L1s, each with at least 500K sentences, spanning Germanic, Romance and Balto-Slavic groups. Multilingual countries such as Belgium and Switzerland were excluded.
  • Method: synonym sets with mixed etymologies (e.g., {weariness, tiredness, fatigue}) are compared across "Englishes" of different L1s. Example: Spanish authors prefer fatigue, which resembles Spanish fatiga.
  • Usage example: approbation occurs 48 times in L1-French texts, versus 5, 4 and 4 in equal-sized UK, Irish and Canadian samples.
  • Proposed applications: native language identification for advanced writers, L1-aware error correction and language-learning personalization, and lexical simplification.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Carnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh · United States598 works · 191,225 citations🏢IBMArmonk · United States154 works · 72,606 citations🎓University of HaifaHaifa · Israel29 works · 938 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Grammatical error correction & learner language · 162 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 250 works

Cite

Cite as Ella Rabinovich, Yulia Tsvetkov and Shuly Wintner. 2018. Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/tacl_a_00024

@article{rabinovich2018native,
  title = {{Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice}},
  author = {Ella Rabinovich, Yulia Tsvetkov and Shuly Wintner},
  journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.1162/tacl\_a\_00024},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00024}
}

References

37 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. David Bamman, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith. Distributed representations of geographically situated language. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 828–834, Baltimore, Maryland, June 2014. Association for Computatio… find
  2. Shane Bergsma, Matt Post, and David Yarowsky. Stylometric analysis of scientific articles. In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 327–337. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012… find
  3. Yevgeni Berzak, Roi Reichart, and Boris Katz. Reconstructing native language typology from foreign language usage. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 21–29, June 2014. URL http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/W14-1603.pdf. ↗
  4. Yevgeni Berzak, Roi Reichart, and Boris Katz. Contrastive analysis with predictive power: Typology driven estimation of grammatical error distributions in ESL. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 94–102, July 2015. URL http://aclweb.org/ anthology/… ↗
  5. Daniel Blanchard, Joel Tetreault, Derrick Higgins, Aoife Cahill, and Martin Chodorow. TOEFL11: A corpus of non-native English. ETS Research Report Series, 2013 (2):i–15, 2013. find
  6. Uschi Cop, Nicolas Dirix, Eva Van Assche, Denis Drieghe, and Wouter Duyck. Reading a book in one or two languages? An eye movement study of cognate facilitation in L1 and L2 reading. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(4):747–769, 2017. find
  7. Scott A. Crossley and Danielle S. McNamara. Shared features of L2 writing: Intergroup homogeneity and text classification. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20(4):271–285, 12 2011. ISSN 1060-3743. doi: 10.1016/j.jslw.2011.05.007. — [doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2011.05.007](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2011.05.007) find
  8. Annette M. de Groot. Determinants of word translation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18(5):1001, 1992. find
  9. Gerard de Melo. Etymological WordNet: Tracing the history of words. In Proceedings of the 9th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2014), Paris, France, 2014. ELRA.
  10. Tamar Degani and Natasha Tokowicz. Semantic ambiguity within and across languages: An integrative review. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(7):1266–1303, 2010. find
  11. Tamar Degani, Anat Prior, and Walaa Hajajra. Cross-language semantic influences in different script bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, pages 1–23, 2017. find
  12. Jeroen Geertzen, Theodora Alexopoulou, and Anna Korhonen. Automatic linguistic annotation of large scale L2 databases: The EF-Cambridge open language database (EFCAMDAT). In Proceedings of the 31st Second Language Research Forum, Somerville, MA, 2013. Cascadilla Proceedings Project. find
  13. Sylviane Granger. The International Corpus of Learner English: A New Resource for Foreign Language Learning and Teaching and Second Language Acquisition Research. Tesol Quarterly, pages 538–546, 2003. find
  14. Eli Hinkel. Second language writers’ text: Linguistic and rhetorical features. Routledge, 2002. find
  15. Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund. Eye tracking and the translation process: Reflections on the analysis and interpretation of eye-tracking data. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, pages 201–223, 2014. find
  16. Scott Jarvis and Aneta Pavlenko. Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. Routledge, 2008. find
  17. Ekaterina Kochmar and Ekaterina Shutova. Modelling semantic acquisition in second language learning. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 293–302, 2017. find
  18. Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Schler, and Kfir Zigdon. Determining an author’s native language by mining a text for errors. In Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery in data mining, pages 624–628. ACM, 2005. find
  19. Judith F. Kroll, Susan C. Bobb, and Noriko Hoshino. Two languages in mind: Bilingualism as a tool to investigate language, cognition, and the brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(3):159–163, Jun 2014. doi: 10.1177/0963721414528511. — [doi:10.1177/0963721414528511](https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414528511) find
  20. Victor Kuperman, Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez, and Marc Brysbaert. Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(4):978– 990, Dec 2012. ISSN 1554-3528. doi: 10.3758/ s13428-012-0210-4. URL https://doi.org/ 10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4. — [doi:10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4](https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4) find
  21. Xiaofei Lu and Haiyang Ai. Syntactic complexity in college-level English writing: Differences among writers with diverse L1 backgrounds. Journal of Second Language Writing, 29, 2015. ISSN 1060-3743. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.06.003. URL http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/… — [doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2015.06.003](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.06.003) ↗
  22. Shervin Malmasi, Keelan Evanini, Aoife Cahill, Joel Tetreault, Robert Pugh, Christopher Hamill, Diane Napolitano, and Yao Qian. A report on the 2017 native language identification shared task. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 6… find
  23. Burt L. Monroe, Michael P. Colaresi, and Kevin M. Quinn. Fightin’words: Lexical feature selection and evaluation for identifying the content of political conflict. Political Analysis, 16(4):372–403, 2008. find
  24. Ryo Nagata and Edward W. D. Whittaker. Reconstructing an Indo-European family tree from non-native English texts. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1137–1147, August 2013. URL http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P13/P13-1112.pdf. ↗
  25. Vivi Nastase and Carlo Strapparava. Word etymology as native language interference. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2702–2707. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2017. URL http://aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1286. ↗
  26. Magali Paquot and Sylviane Granger. Formulaic language in learner corpora. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 32:130–149, 2012. find
  27. Anat Prior. Bilingualism: Interactions between languages. In Patricia J. Brook and Vera Kempe, editors, Encyclopedia of Language Development. Sage Publications, 2014. URL http://dx.doi.org/10. 4135/9781483346441. find
  28. Anat Prior, Brian MacWhinney, and Judith F. Kroll. Translation norms for English and Spanish: The role of lexical variables, word class, and L2 proficiency in negotiating translation ambiguity. Behavior Research Methods, 39(4):1029–1038, 2007. find
  29. Kristopher Kyle and Scott A. Crossley. Automatically assessing lexical sophistication: Indices, tools, findings, and application. Tesol Quarterly, 49(4):757–786, 2015. find
  30. Anat Prior, Shuly Wintner, Brian Macwhinney, and Alon Lavie. Translation ambiguity in and out of context. Applied Psycholinguistics, 32(1):93–111, 2011. find
  31. Maya R. Libben and Debra A. Titone. Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movements during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(2):381, 2009. find
  32. Ella Rabinovich, Noam Ordan, and Shuly Wintner. Found in translation: Reconstructing phylogenetic language trees from translations. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 530–540. Association for Computational Linguis… find
  33. Miriam Shlesinger. Effects of presentation rate on working memory in simultaneous interpreting. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 12:37–49, 2003. URL http://hdl.handle.net/10077/2470. ↗
  34. Anna Siyanova-Chanturia. Collocation in beginner learner writing: A longitudinal study. System, 53:148– 160, 2015. find
  35. Joel Tetreault, Daniel Blanchard, and Aoife Cahill. A report on the first native language identification shared task. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP. Association for Computational Linguistics, June 2013. find
  36. Laura Mayfield Tomokiyo and Rosie Jones. You’re not from ’round here, are you?: Naive Bayes detection of non-native utterance text. In Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1–8. Association for Computational Linguistic… find
  37. Yulia Tsvetkov, Naama Twitto, Nathan Schneider, Noam Ordan, Manaal Faruqui, Victor Chahuneau, Shuly Wintner, and Chris Dyer. Identifying the L1 of non-native writers: the CMU-Haifa system. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 279… find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rabinovich-2018-native-language-cognate-effects-second/