Correctly spelling an English word requires a high-quality orthographic representation. When faced with spelling a complex word without a high-quality representation, spellers often rely on other knowledge sources (e.g., incomplete stored orthographic forms, phonological to orthographic relationships) to spell it. For bilinguals, another potentially facilitative source is knowledge of a word's lexical and sublexical representations in another language. In the current study we considered simultaneous effects of word-level (e.g., frequency, cognate status) and person-level (e.g., English spelling skill, prompting, bilingual status) predictors on college students’ complex English word spelling. Monolinguals (English; n = 42) significantly outperformed bilinguals (Spanish and English; n = 76) on non-cognate spelling; no group differences emerged for cognate spelling accuracy. Within bilinguals, significantly higher spelling performance on cognates compared to non-cognates suggests cognate facilitation, with no prompting effects. Findings expand an interdisciplinary framework of understanding bilinguals’ activation and use of cross-linguistic representations in spelling.

Previous research has shown that the direction of the cognate facilitation effect (CFE) can disappear if identical cognate words are removed from the stimulus list while keeping task requirements constant (Comesaña, Ferré, Romero, Guasch, Soares & García-Chico, 2015). These results do not fit well with leading computational models of bilingual word recognition (BIA+, Multilink), according to which there are no top-down influences at early stages of word processing. Influences would be post-lexical in nature and would result from competition at the response level. This study aimed to examine this issue by manipulating stimulus list composition and examining its impact on cognate word recognition. We varied the proportion of identical cognates in the experimental lists with four ratios of identical vs. non-identical cognates (50-50; 25-75; 12-88, and 0-100, respectively). Results showed that the CFE gradually decreases as the proportion of identical cognates also decreases. These findings cannot be explained by mechanisms of response competition, but instead seem to imply a dynamic and language-specific top-down regulation of lexical activation.

The cognate facilitation effect (i.e., a processing advantage for cognates compared to non-cognates) is an evidence of language non-selectivity in bilingual lexical access. Several studies using behavioral or electrophysiological measures have demonstrated that this effect is modulated by the degree of formal overlap between translations. However, it has never been tested with a psychophysiological measure such as pupillometry. In the present study we replicate the cognate facilitation effect by examining reaction times and pupil responses. Our results endorse pupillometry as a promising tool for bilingual research, and confirm the modulation of the cognate effect by the degree of formal similarity.