Identifying hidden cognate effects in L2 lexical retrieval tasks: A tutorial for stimulus design

Psycholinguistic research involving multilingual participants often examines the extent to which processing of one language is related to processing of another, especially during semantic priming. When choosing crosslinguistic task items in second language (L2) vocabulary research, researchers often control for dimensions such as orthographic or phonetic overlap that may lead to a task advantage that does not represent semantic priming effects from the L2 during lexical retrieval. Prior research shows that cognates may facilitate lexical retrieval across a bilingual's languages by activating both lexical representations of a task item (e.g., Sánchez-Casas et al., 1992; Van Assche et al., 2009). However, the cognate status of words that are semantically related to a target have not been fully considered as potential confounds, even though these pairs may trigger semantic activation that similarly facilitates recognition. In this paper, we detail seven steps researchers can take when evaluating crosslinguistic target pairs to avoid compromising their paradigm due to activation of cognate synonyms. This approach allows language researchers to screen stimuli for several confounding dimensions including semantic similarity, orthographic similarity, and etymological relatedness, ultimately strengthening the validity of crosslinguistic vocabulary tasks to better elicit and evaluate lexical activation in multilinguals. We conclude by showcasing our method to evaluate a sample set of English-Spanish items and provide code for researchers to evaluate their own crosslinguistic stimuli pairs.