Color entrenchment in Middle-School learners of English as a Second Language: Cognitive Salience Index applied to a bilingual setting

The present study investigates the Cognitive Salience Index (CSI) of English and Italian color terms in a group of Italian 10-year-old students learning English as a Second Language. The study aims at replicating Jodi Sandford (2016) study on the entrenchment of color terms in a population of American middle-school speakers. The CSI provides a quantitative measure of the relative salience of linguistic terms, reflecting cognitive and cultural prioritizations. By adapting Sandford’s approach to a bilingual context, this research examines how Italian children’s cognitive salience of color terms varies between their native Italian and second language, English. Participants will complete elicitation tasks designed to reveal the frequency, ranking, and contextual use of color terms in both languages. The findings aim to shed light on cross-linguistic influences, developmental patterns in bilingual lexicon organization, and the impact of cultural factors on the salience of perceptual categories. Particularly, they will provide insights on the embodied processes that subsume the creation of salience in the developing stages of English as Lingua Franca. Morever, the study contributes to broader discussions on language acquisition, cognitive salience, and the interaction between linguistic relativity and bilingual cognition.