Effects of cognate and relatedness status on word recognition in Russian-English bilinguals of upper-intermediate and advanced levels

By this study we intend to contribute to understanding the role lexical and semantic information play across languages (the native language L1 and the second language L2) during the early stages of word recognition. Our study focuses on lexical and semantic levels of language processing using cross-language semantic and lexical priming as a tool to reveal the relationship between the two languages in bilingual mind. The phenomena under study are cognate words and semantically related words effects on language processing in bilinguals. Basing on the results of two experiments, differing in language proficiency characteristics of the participants, a consistent inhibitory cognate effect was obtained in both groups, with cross language semantic priming effect being facilitating also irrespective of the language proficiency characteristics of the participants.