The Impact of Cognates on Comprehension and Memory

Dear Colleagues,

The purpose of this special issue is to provide a collection of empirical and theoretical papers that reflect the state-of-the-art in terms of our scientific understanding of the ways in which cross-language activation of cognates impact comprehension and memory.

Scope

We are seeking both empirical articles as well as reviews that address either the impact of cognate status on comprehension (across all modalities) or memory or both. Empirical submissions will be prioritized however, integrative reviews that provide novel insights will also be considered. For this special issue the focus is on comprehension and/or memory beyond a single word, whether it be a clause, sentence, or discourse. We are especially interested in submissions that examine the impact of cognates status in non-Indo-European languages that are underrepresented in science and/or language pairs that represent a diversity of scripts. We also encourage submissions examining the impact of cognate status on comprehension and memory in children and older adults.

Relationship to the Literature

It has now been conclusively demonstrated that bilingual lexical access is language non-selective and that cognate representations across languages are co-activated and impact processing across a wide spectrum of tasks and contexts. We now turn our attention to the downstream impact of this coactivation on comprehension and memory for linguistic units beyond the single word.

 We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor (aischwartz@utep.edu) or to /Languages/ editorial office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Dr. Ana I. Schwartz
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.