Cognate Facilitation in Different-Script Trilinguals as a Function of Task Demands

The present study examined how Arabic–Hebrew–English trilinguals process double and triple cognate words in their third language (L3) across three different experiments. Utilizing the same set of critical cognate items, trilinguals completed a semantic relatedness task, a lexical decision task, or a sentence reading eye-tracking task. The results revealed a significant cognate facilitation effect in the semantic relatedness task, with no consistent differences in the magnitude of facilitation across double and triple cognates, suggesting that both L1 and L2 are activated during L3 processing. In contrast, no cognate facilitation was observed in the lexical decision or the sentence reading tasks. These results demonstrate that the cognate facilitation is task-dependent, varying with the degree to which meaning is activated, sentential context is available, and orthographic cues are involved. Critically, the study extends findings of phonologically mediated cross-language activation from bilinguals to trilinguals.