Does Spanish knowledge contribute to accurate English word spelling in adult bilinguals?

Abstract Correctly spelling an English word requires a high-quality orthographic representation. When faced with complex without representation, spellers often rely on other knowledge sources (e.g., incomplete stored forms, phonological to relationships) spell it. For bilinguals, another potentially facilitative source is of word's lexical and sublexical representations in language. In the current study we considered simultaneous effects word-level frequency, cognate status) person-level skill, prompting, bilingual predictors college students’ spelling. Monolinguals (English; n = 42) significantly outperformed bilinguals (Spanish English; 76) non-cognate spelling; no group differences emerged for accuracy. Within higher performance cognates compared non-cognates suggests facilitation, prompting effects. Findings expand interdisciplinary framework understanding bilinguals’ activation use cross-linguistic