Investigating individual differences in adult bilinguals’ spelling of cognates: An analysis of cross-linguistic effects

Examining 62 college students who are bilingual in Spanish and English, this study assessed key predictors of irregular English word spelling accuracy, including cognates and non-cognates. Explanatory item response models tested the contributions of word-level (e.g., orthographic similarity [OS] and phonemic similarity [PS] between English and Spanish word forms) and person-level predictors (e.g., literacy skills in English and Spanish) to item-level spelling accuracy. In line with prior investigations of cognate spelling in English, spelling accuracy was predicted by generally stronger English decoding skill and higher OS, with no significant influence of Spanish abilities. However, OS effects diminished after removing identical cognates from the outcome variable. An exploratory analysis revealed similar effects of English and Spanish decoding fluency on the likelihood of non-cognate spelling accuracy. These results have implications for understanding how orthographic representations of cognates are stored and accessed in the bilingual lexicon, particularly in alphabetic orthographies.