Although Japanese–English cognates can easily be identified by simply considering the overlap of form and meaning across languages, a much more precise definition of “cognateness” can be determined by the use of bilingual measures of perceived similarity. Thus, for the purposes of this article, we will refer to any cross-linguistic word pairs that share form and meaning as cognates. However, in this case not the historical origin of such words in a language, but instead their cross-linguistic similarity, influences their processing. In the case of the Japanese word ボール / booru/ “ball,” it is more appropriately called a loanword/borrowing. Thus, when words had form and meaning overlap (e.g., English night, French nuit, German nacht), this was in fact due to the modern words having a common historical root (e.g., Latin nocte) therefore, they were cognates. This is because, until recently, most of the research has investigated the processing of European languages (e.g., Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). In the literature on bilingual word processing, words that share both form and meaning are usually referred to as cognates (Dijkstra, 2007). Moreover, in the present research we show that this overlap is perceived by bilinguals to be continuous in nature. Such overlap, or what we will refer to in the present research as cross-linguistic similarity, plays an important role in bilingual language processing (Allen & Conklin, 2013 Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sappeli, & Baayen, 2010).

The two words overlap a great deal in P, although there is no O overlap, as the two languages are written in different scripts. This issue of degree of S overlap is a crucial aspect of the present research and is discussed in more depth later. For example, the English word ball and the Japanese word ボール /booru/ overlap in terms of S, although not all of the senses of English ball are associated with the Japanese word /booru/. Words in different languages can also have such overlap. Importantly, research has shown that such overlap can increase activation and speed processing, or create competition and slow processing (Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall, Spieler, & Yap, 2004 Jared, McRae, & Seidenberg, 1990 McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). Words within a language can have formal (phonological and orthographic ) and/or semantic (S) overlap (e.g., bat/bat, tear/tear, break/brake, couch/sofa ). This creates a comprehensive bilingual data set for these different-script languages and should be of use in bilingual word recognition and spoken language research.

Finally, correlations and characteristics of the cognate and noncognate items are detailed, so as to provide a complete overview of the lexical and semantic characteristics of the stimuli. Additional information on L1/L2 word frequency, L1/L2 number of senses, and L1/L2 word length and number of syllables is also provided. Norming data were also collected for L1 age of acquisition, L1 concreteness, and L2 familiarity, because such information had been unavailable for the item set. This difference in translation equivalency likely extends to other nonetymologically related, different-script languages in which cognates are all loanwords (e.g., Korean–English). Notably, we reveal for the first time that Japanese–English cognates are “special,” in the sense that they are usually translated using one English term (e.g., コール /kooru/ is always translated as “call”), but the English word is translated into a greater variety of Japanese words. Bilinguals also translated these words in both directions (L1–L2 and L2–L1), providing a measure of translation equivalency. We show that the degree of cross-linguistic overlap varies, such that words can be more or less “cognate,” in terms of their phonological and semantic overlap. In the present study, Japanese (first language L1)–English (second language L2) bilinguals rated 193 Japanese–English word pairs, including cognates and noncognates, in terms of phonological and semantic similarity.

Formal and semantic overlap across languages plays an important role in bilingual language processing systems.

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