Cognate status and dialectal variation in bilingual spoken word recognition: the role of language dominance in catalan–spanish listeners

Abstract

This study investigates how cognate status, dialectal variation, and language dominance influence spoken word recognition in Catalan–Spanish bilinguals. Thirty participants completed a lexical decision task in which they listened to Catalan words presented in either Central Catalan (their native dialect) or Valencian (a non-native dialect), and categorized them as real words or not. The stimuli included both cognates and non-cognates with Spanish. Reaction times were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models, with language dominance measured continuously using the Bilingual Language Profile. Results showed that dialectal variation and language dominance modulated the effect of cognate status: while no main effect of cognates emerged in Central Catalan, a significant cognate disadvantage was found in Valencian, especially among Spanish-dominant participants. These findings suggest that cross-linguistic phonological similarity can hinder rather than facilitate recognition when combined with dialectal unfamiliarity, and highlight the importance of individual linguistic profiles in bilingual lexical access. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how phonological variation across dialects interacts with bilingual processing mechanisms.