Solana Messerly and Dr. Jeffrey Turley, Spanish and Portuguese
The Spanish and English languages share many cognates because Latin greatly influenced both of them. Spanish is a neo-Latin language; although English is a Germanic language, many of its words have Latin origins. As a result, there are thousands of Latinate words in both languages, but their use is much less frequent in English than in Spanish. English Latinate words are so uncommon that speakers unconsciously use them to sound more intelligent and elegant. English Latinate words tend to have Spanish cognates. It is fascinating that although these cognates share the same meaning, they share neither the same frequency nor the same social register. Many everyday Spanish words have uncommon, formal English cognates that “may even be absent from some speakers’ lexicons.”
My project objective was to ascertain to what extent learning the Spanish language enhances the passive vocabulary of native English speakers. Specifically, I aimed to determine how well students are able to infer meaning when confronted with unfamiliar English words that have familiar Spanish cognates. To achieve this objective, I proctored vocabulary tests that assessed cognate recognition to intermediate Spanish students.
Throughout the research process, I adapted my proposed objective and method to better work with the resources available. Part of my original objective was to find out how beneficial it is for instructors to teach cognate recognition, and I was going to determine this by comparing a control group, in which students received no special instruction, and an experimental group, in which students learned to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar English words by referring to their Spanish cognates. I was not able to carry out this part of my research because my faculty mentor, who was going to teach these groups, was not assigned two intermediate courses. Due to this scheduling difficulty, the forementioned facet of my proposal needs more exploration.
I conducted my research on 35 students enrolled in Spanish 321 at Brigham Young University. From the course readings, I selected 18 everyday Spanish words that resembled uncommon English words. The students learned these Spanish words along with their regular coursework. At the end of the semester, I administered two multiple-choice vocabulary tests, one evaluating whether or not students had learned the selected Spanish words and the other evaluating whether or not they could correctly define their rare English cognates. The tests were identical except for the language of the assessed words. Each of the 18 questions had four possible answers, and the correct answer was a condensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition. To ensure the OED definitions were also accurate for the Spanish words, I consulted the Real Acadamia Española’s official webpage as well as Wordreference.com.
I selected words for the vocabulary tests based on their frequency. I chose very common Spanish words with such uncommon English cognates that students would be very unlikely to define them correctly if they did not know the Spanish term. To determine word frequencies, I consulted Professor Mark Davies’ Corpus of Spanish and the British National Corpus, using 1.2 occurrences per million as the threshold between frequent and infrequent (Table 1). The Spanish words have frequencies equal to or greater than 1.2, and the English words have frequencies lower than 1.2. Furthermore, the OED describes many of the English words as obsolete and archaic.
The vocabulary tests’ results reveal a clear connection between Spanish vocabulary knowledge and English vocabulary knowledge (Table 2). Over 90 percent of the time, students correctly identified the rare English words when they knew their Spanish cognates. These results show that learning Spanish greatly enhances students’ English skills, a finding that should promote foreign language teaching. As students of Spanish become aware of Spanish-English cognates, they gain superior passive vocabularies. I hope this conclusion will encourage teachers to instruct cognate recognition and students to highly esteem language learning.