This study examined the influence of cognate status and language distance on simultaneous bilingual children's vocabulary acquisition. It aimed to tease apart effects of word‐level similarities and language‐level similarities, while also exploring the role of individual‐level variation in age, exposure, and nontarget language proficiency. Children simultaneously acquiring two closely related languages (n = 203) or two more distant languages (n = 109) performed extended versions of the LITMUS Cross‐Linguistic Lexical Task (Haman et al., 2015), a productive vocabulary test with words varying in their phonological similarity to their translation equivalents. Children speaking closely related languages obtained higher vocabulary scores than children speaking more distant languages, who showed a stronger positive effect of phonological similarity. The effect of language distance on vocabulary was not solely driven by the presence of (near‐)identical cognates in the test. These findings show that similarities beyond specific test items and/or beyond the phonological level play a role in vocabulary acquisition.

中文翻译：

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同源词和语言距离在同时双语儿童高效词汇习得中的作用


本研究探讨了同源状态和语言距离对同时双语儿童词汇习得的影响。它的目的是区分单词级相似性和语言级相似性的影响，同时还探讨个体水平差异在年龄、接触程度和非目标语言熟练程度方面的作用。儿童同时学习两种密切相关的语言（ n = 203) 或两种更遥远的语言 ( n = 109）执行了 LITMUS 跨语言词汇任务（Haman 等人，2015）的扩展版本，这是一项富有成效的词汇测试，其中单词的语音相似性与其翻译对应项不同。使用密切相关语言的儿童比使用相距较远的语言的儿童获得更高的词汇分数，后者表现出更强的语音相似性正效应。语言距离对词汇量的影响不仅仅由测试中（几乎）相同的同源词的存在驱动。这些发现表明，超出特定测试项目和/或超出语音水平的相似性在词汇习得中发挥着作用。