title: Cross-linguistic similarity norms for Japanese-English translation equivalents.
abstract: Formal and semantic overlap across languages plays an important role in bilingual language processing systems. In the present study, Japanese (first language; L1)-English (second language; L2) bilinguals rated 193 Japanese-English word pairs, including cognates and noncognates, in terms of phonological and semantic similarity. We show that the degree of cross-linguistic overlap varies, such that words can be more or less "cognate," in terms of their phonological and semantic overlap. Bilinguals also translated these words in both directions (L1-L2 and L2-L1), providing a measure of translation equivalency. Notably, we reveal for the first time that Japanese-English cognates are "special," in the sense that they are usually translated using one English term (e.g., コール /kooru/ is always translated as "call"), but the English word is translated into a greater variety of Japanese words. This difference in translation equivalency likely extends to other non-etymologically related, different-script languages in which cognates are all loanwords (e.g., Korean-English). Norming data were also collected for L1 age of acquisition, L1 concreteness, and L2 familiarity, because such information had been unavailable for the item set. Additional information on L1/L2 word frequency, L1/L2 number of senses, and L1/L2 word length and number of syllables is also provided. Finally, correlations and characteristics of the cognate and noncognate items are detailed, so as to provide a complete overview of the lexical and semantic characteristics of the stimuli. This creates a comprehensive bilingual data set for these different-script languages and should be of use in bilingual word recognition and spoken language research.
authors.affiliation: School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, david.allen@nottingham.ac.uk.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Allen
authors.forename: Kathy
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Conklin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004739:England; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007564:Japan; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011159:Population Surveillance; D012660:Semantics; D014177:Translations; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult
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