This study examines the impact of the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equiv-alents on word recognition by Russian-English bilinguals, fluent in languages with two differ-ent but partially overlapping writing systems. Certain models (e.g., BIA+) hold that in bilin-gual word recognition, words in another lan-guage that are similar to the input become ac-tivated and are considered for
... [Show full abstract] selection (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002). These acti-vation models are consistent with empirical data on bilinguals who use totally different scripts, like Japanese and English (Miwa et al., 2013). Little is known about the Russian-English pair of languages, even though some studies indicate that, similar to the Japanese-English language combination, the partially distinct character of the Russian and the Eng-lish scripts does not prevent activation of the corresponding non-target language (Jouravlev & Jared, 2014; Marian & Spivey 2003; Kaushanskaya & Marian 2007).
