LEXICAL SIMILARITY LEVEL BETWEEN ENGLISH AND PORTUGUESE.

Although the studies which calculate the similarity index between languages are abundant, to date the similarity index between English and Portuguese has not been calculated. When calculating the similarity index between English and Portuguese it is important to have in consideration the amount of Latin loan words English has received from Latin which may influence the similarity index. However, English is a Germanic language whereas Portuguese is a Romance language. The purpose of this research is to calculate this level of lexical similarity through the computational lexical distance comparison of 500 high frequency words in English and Portuguese and the identification of cognates. The main hypothesis of this study is based on the fact that English and Portuguese degree of genetic difference may be less than 30% considering that the comparison of English with other Romance languages has resulted in similar indexes The study is aimed at assisting students of English or Portuguese as an L2 with their language acquisition through the identification of items which present similarities in both languages and in this manner aid vocabulary acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]