Four hypotheses regarding the impact of discourse context on cross-language lexical activation were tested. Highly-proficient, Spanish–English bilinguals read all-English paragraphs containing non-identical and identical cognates or noncognate controls while their eye-movements were tracked. There were four paragraph conditions based on a full crossing of semantic bias from the topic sentence and sentence containing the critical word. In analyses in which cognate status was treated categorically there was an interaction between global bias and cognates status such that the observed inhibitory effects of cognate status were attenuated in global-neutral contexts. Follow-up analyses on the non-identical cognates in which orthographic overlap was treated continuously revealed a U-shaped function between orthographic overlap and processing time, which was more pronounced in global-neutral contexts. The overall pattern of findings is consistent with a combined operation of resonant-based and feature-restriction mechanisms of context effects.

The cognate facilitation effect (i.e., a processing advantage for cognates compared to non-cognates) is an evidence of language non-selectivity in bilingual lexical access. Several studies using behavioral or electrophysiological measures have demonstrated that this effect is modulated by the degree of formal overlap between translations. However, it has never been tested with a psychophysiological measure such as pupillometry. In the present study we replicate the cognate facilitation effect by examining reaction times and pupil responses. Our results endorse pupillometry as a promising tool for bilingual research, and confirm the modulation of the cognate effect by the degree of formal similarity.