Cognates and the Bilingual Mental Lexicon The core of my research project is the word group of cognates. Some examples for cognates in English and German are nose and Nase, gold and Gold, orshoe and Schuh. Cognates are words, or word pairs, which share the same meaning and additionally show a very similar orthography and/or very similar phonology. These properties lead to significant facilitation effects in language perception and production. Yet, they also pose many questions - a particularly intriguing question is where we can locate them in the bilingual mental lexicon and how they are connected in it. In my research I investigate cognates from different linguistic perspectives (psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, second language acquisition, etymology, etc.) and attempt to pinpoint what constitues a cognate as well as what place these words may take in the mental lexicon.