Are cognates as easy to recognize as we think?

Abstract

Cognates are words that are very morphologically and phonologically similar to their translations into another language. Hence, it is expected that L2 students understand cognates better than noncognates. However, not all cognates are as easy to interpret by students as instructors think a priori. In this paper, we categorized a series of cognates (Spanish-English) according to their similarity with their equivalent counterparts in the L2 (Spanish) and we contrasted this categorization with some basic Spanish students¿ intuitions and those of their instructors. After all this, we proposed a new categorization that is adapted to our results in a better way.