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

正确拼写英语单词需要高质量的正字法表示。当面对拼写没有高质量表示的复杂单词时，拼写者通常依赖其他知识源（例如，不完整存储的拼写形式、语音与拼写关系）来拼写它。对于双语者来说，另一个潜在的促进来源是了解单词在另一种语言中的词汇和词汇下表示形式。在当前的研究中，我们考虑了单词层面（例如，频率、同源状态）和个人层面（例如，英语拼写技能、提示、双语状态）预测因素对大学生复杂英语单词拼写的同时影响。在非同源拼写方面，单语者（英语；n = 42）显着优于双语者（西班牙语和英语；n = 76）；同源拼写准确性没有出现群体差异。在双语者中，与非同源词相比，同源词的拼写表现明显更高，这表明同源词有促进作用，但没有提示作用。研究结果扩展了理解双语者的激活和拼写中跨语言表征的使用的跨学科框架。