نبذة مختصرة : Bilingual infants acquire words at a similar rate as monolingual ones, despite navigating a more intricate linguistic environment. The mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain elusive. Our project addressed the potential facilitation role of cognateness—phonological similarity across translation equivalents (TEs)—in bilingual lexical development. The acquisition trajectories of a large sample of Catalan and Spanish words revealed such cognateness facilitation effect, particularly in the language of lower exposure. We presented a theoretical account of this effect, based on the language non-selective hypothesis of lexical access: the Accumulator Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition (AMBLA). We tested the plausibility of this model by using an experimental paradigm of word recognition. Overall, our study sheds light on the impact of language non-selectivity on the initial bilingual lexicon.
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