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Do The Cognacy Characteristics Of Loanwords Make Them More Easily Learned Than Noncognates?, James Rogers, Stuart Webb, Tatsuya Nakata

Education Publications

This study investigates the effects of cognacy on vocabulary learning. The research expands on earlier designs by measuring learning of English–Japanese cognates with both decontextualized and contextualized tests, scoring responses at two levels of sensitivity, and examining learning in a more ecologically valid setting. The results indicated that Japanese learners could successfully recall the L2 forms of more cognates than noncognates, supporting earlier findings. However, when scoring was sensitive to partial knowledge of written form, the results indicated that greater knowledge of noncognates was gained. Because there was greater potential for learning noncognates due to the higher pretest scores for …