Cognates are studied in many psychological studies of bilingual language processing. Despite their frequent use, there is no clear operationalized definition of what constitutes a cognate. We conducted a literature search in three major journals to better understand how cognate status is typically defined and operationalized. In these journals, we analyzed similarity of cognate and non-cognate stimuli. We found that approximately 60% of the reviewed studies operationalized cognate status empirically. Stimulus analyses revealed a similarity continuum between cognates and non-cognates without a consistent cut-off. Based on these results, we make recommendations for future research.

中文翻译：

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什么构成同源？对双语研究的启示

许多双语语言处理的心理学研究都对同源词进行了研究。尽管它们被频繁使用，但对于同源词的构成并没有明确的可操作定义。我们在三个主要期刊上进行了文献检索，以更好地了解同源状态通常是如何定义和操作的。在这些期刊中，我们分析了同源刺激和非同源刺激的相似性。我们发现大约 60% 的审查研究根据经验操作了同源状态。刺激分析揭示了同源物和非同源物之间的相似性连续体，没有一致的截止点。根据这些结果，我们为未来的研究提出建议。