Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice

Autor:	Rabinovich, Ella, Tsvetkov, Yulia, Wintner, Shuly
Rok vydání:	2018
Předmět:	Computer Science - Computation and Language
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
Popis:	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. Comment: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2018; 14 pages
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09590 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv