Cognate Effects on Anaphor Processing

There are numerous studies demonstrating facilitated processing of cognates relative to noncognates for bilinguals, providing evidence that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective. We tested whether cross-language activation affects comprehension of larger units of meaning, focusing specifically on comprehension of anaphoric references. Highly proficient, Spanish--English bilinguals read sentences either in English (Experiment 1) or Spanish (Experiment 2) while their eye movements were recorded. Sentences consisted of an initial clause with 2 nouns that were either cognates or noncognates, and a later clause with an anaphor that either referred to the first or second noun. In the English experiment, cognate status facilitated selection of the sentence's foundational noun, reflected by shorter reading times for cognate nouns in the first position. Processing of pronouns was facilitated when they referred to cognates, reflected by higher skipping rates and shorter reading times. Final selection of cognate referents was also facilitated, reflected by total reading shorter total reading times, but only when the pronoun referred to the first noun. In the Spanish experiment, total reading times for cognate nouns were shorter, irrespective of their order of mention, reflecting a general cognate facilitation effect that was not affected by which noun was selected as the foundational structure. Spillover fixations from anaphors referring to cognates were shorter than noncognates, but only when they were the second-mentioned noun, suggesting that cognate status affected coreferencing for the more recently encountered noun. Implications for theories of cross-language activation and anaphoric reference are discussed.