A Database of Dutch-English Cognates, Interlingual Homographs and Translation Equivalents

To investigate the structure of the bilingual mental lexicon, researchers in the field of bilingualism often use words that exist in multiple languages: cognates (which have the same meaning) and interlingual homographs (which have a different meaning). A high proportion of these studies have investigated language processing in Dutch-English bilinguals. Despite the abundance of research using such materials, few studies exist that have validated such materials. We conducted two rating experiments in which Dutch-English bilinguals rated the meaning, spelling and pronunciation similarity of pairs of Dutch and English words. On the basis of these results, we present a new database of Dutch-English identical cognates (e.g. "wolf"-"wolf"; n = 58), non-identical cognates (e.g. "kat"-"cat"; n = 74), interlingual homographs (e.g. "angel"-"angel"; n = 72) and translation equivalents (e.g. "wortel"-"carrot"; n = 78). The database can be accessed at http://osf.io/tcdxb/.