Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g., banana–banane) are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-cognates. The present study explored if there is such an advantage for cognate production in bilinguals’ early vocabulary development. Longitudinal expressive vocabulary data were collected from 47 English–French bilinguals starting at 16–20 months up to 27 months (a total of 219 monthly administrations in both English and French). Children produced a greater proportion of cognates than non-cognates, and the interval between producing a word and its translation equivalent was about 10–15 days shorter for cognates than for non-cognates. The findings suggest that cognate learning is facilitated in early bilingual vocabulary development, such that phonological overlap supports bilinguals in learning phonologically similar words across their two languages.

双语者需要学习两个单词来表达大多数概念。这些词被称为翻译对等词，那些听起来也相似的词（例如，banana- banane ）被称为同源词。研究一致表明，儿童和成人比非同源名称更容易处理和处理同源名称。本研究探讨了同源产生在双语者早期词汇发展中是否具有这样的优势。纵向表达词汇数据从 47 名英法双语者中收集，从 16-20 个月到 27 个月（英语和法语总共 219 个月的管理）。儿童产生的同源词的比例高于非同源词，并且同源词产生一个单词与其翻译对应词之间的间隔比非同源词短约 10-15 天。研究结果表明，同源学习在早期双语词汇发展中得到促进，因此语音重叠支持双语者在两种语言中学习语音相似的单词。