Mulder, K. 1, 2 , Dijkstra, T. 1 & Schreuder, R. . 1
1 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2 International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Decades of research have brought more insight into how bilinguals recognize cognates presented in isolation. However, little is known about what bilinguals actually look at when they process cognates. Cognates are translation equivalents with form overlap across languages, such as WINTER, which is spelled in the same way in Dutch and German (and English). Cognates provide form-ambiguous input in a word identification task, because they could belong to both the target and non-target language. In the case of non-identical cognates, such as GENERATIE (Dutch) and GENERATION (German, English), language-specific orthographic cues solve this ambiguity. We reasoned that if bilinguals do indeed use such cues during word identification, this might be reflected in their eye-fixations, which would be longer on the position at which the two cognates differ. In a Dutch (L2) lexical decision task, German-Dutch bilinguals were presented with German-Dutch identical and non-identical cognates, and with Dutch non-cognate control words while their eye-movements were monitored. The Dutch orthography of the non-identical cognates differed at either the beginning (e.g., CILINDER/ZILINDER) or end (MYSTERIE/MYSTERIUM) of the word from its German equivalent. As a separate test, pseudowords were included that differed at the beginning or end from existing cognates or Dutch non-cognate words.