Talking to nonnative speakers: Investigating language-specific audience design and cognate use

When conversing with a nonnative (L2) speaker of a language, native (L1) speakers often try in improve their comprehensibility by engaging in what is termed “foreigner talk,” speaking slower and using more high-frequency words than they would in a conversation between two L1 speakers (Costa, Pickering, & Sorace, 2008). Because cognates (translation equivalents that share significant phonological overlap between languages) are some of the easiest words to learn in an L2 (Lotto & DeGroot, 1998), one possible form of foreigner talk may involve L1 speakers using more cognates when communicating with L2 speakers. The present two studies explored whether Spanish-English bilinguals used more cognates when speaking to someone who was an L2 rather than a L1 speaker of a language. The results of the first study, in which native Spanish speakers were told to repeat a story to either a native English speaker or a native Spanish speaker, found that people used roughly the same number of Spanish-English cognates regardless of their intended audience. The second study, which used a more interactive referential communication task, showed that native English speakers did use more cognates when they thought that they were communicating with a native Spanish speaker as compared to a fellow native English speaker. These results indicate that L1speakers use more cognates when talking to L2 speakers in some contexts but not others. I discuss possible characteristics (e.g., language direction, audience salience, linguistic proficiency etc.) that may distinguish these contexts from one another