Cognates in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon

When two words look and sound alike across languages, do they share a place in the bilingual mind? Cognates provide a fascinating testing ground for understanding how bilingual speakers organize and access words. Combining theoretical perspectives on the mental lexicon and bilingual language processing with a complex mixed-methods approach, Kristina Weissbecker examines the mental representation of cognates as translation equivalents. The findings reveal a surprising pattern: despite their formal similarity, cognates are more likely to be stored separately rather than as shared lexical representations. The study thus sheds new light on the structure of the bilingual mental lexicon and the mechanisms of lexical access.