Distributions of cognates in Europe as based on Levenshtein distance
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[1] Radboud University Nijmegen
Radboud University Nijmegen
Países Bajos
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- Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 15, Nº 1, 2012 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment), págs. 157-166
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
- Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
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Resumen
Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of six European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Semantic equivalence was determined using the conceptual structure of a translation database. By using a similarity threshold, large numbers of cognates could be selected that nearly completely included the stimulus materials of experimental studies. The identified numbers of form-similar and identical cognates correlated highly with branch lengths of phylogenetic language family trees, supporting the usefulness of the new measure for cross-language comparison. The normalized Levenshtein distance function can be considered as a new formal model of cross-language orthographic similarity.
