A central finding of bilingual research is that cognates – words that share semantic, phonological, and orthographic characteristics across languages – are processed faster than non-cognate words. However, it remains unclear whether cognate facilitation effects are reliant on identical cognates, or whether facilitation simply varies along a continuum of cross-language orthographic and phonological similarity. In two experiments, German–English bilinguals read identical cognates, close cognates, and non-cognates in a lexical decision task and a sentence-reading task while their eye movements were recorded. Participants read the stimuli in their L1 German and L2 English. Converging results found comparable facilitation effects of identical and close cognates vs. non-cognates. Cognate facilitation could be described as a continuous linear effect of cross-language orthographic similarity on lexical decision accuracy and latency, as well as fixation durations. Cross-language phonological similarity modulated the continuous orthographic similarity effect in single word recognition, but not in sentence processing.

中文翻译：

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双语阅读中的同源促进：拼写和语音相似性对词汇决策和眼球运动的影响

双语研究的一个核心发现是，同源词（跨语言共享语义、语音和拼写特征的单词）比非同源词的处理速度更快。然而，目前尚不清楚同源促进效应是否依赖于相同的同源词，或者促进是否只是沿着跨语言拼写和语音相似性的连续体而变化。在两项实验中，德英双语者在词汇决策任务和句子阅读任务中阅读相同同源词、相近同源词和非同源词，同时记录他们的眼球运动。参与者用他们的 L1 德语和 L2 英语阅读刺激材料。收敛结果发现相同和相近的同源词与非同源词的促进效果相当。同源促进可以描述为跨语言拼写相似性对词汇决策准确性和延迟以及注视持续时间的连续线性影响。跨语言语音相似性调节了单词识别中的连续拼写相似性效果，但在句子处理中却没有调节。