Bilingualism, cognates and reading fluency in children Andréa K. Davis, Natalie Bowman and Margarita Kaushanskaya University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Background: The goal of this study was to examine the effect of cognates on Spanish–English bilingual children’ s English reading fluency. Because cognates lead to higher levels of non-target language activation, we hypothesised that the presence of cognates would result in reduced reading fluency for bilingual children. Methods: Monolingual English-speaking children and Spanish–English bilingual children (ages = 8–13 years) read aloud two stories in English. One story contained cognate words, while the other story did not. Results: Results revealed that bilingual children made more errors and read more slowly when reading a story containing cognates. Conclusions: These findings indicate that the presence of cognates in a text disrupts bilinguals’ oral reading fluency, suggesting that lexical-level, local co-activation can have a global effect on bilinguals’ ability to engage in a higher-level reading task. Keywords: bilingualism, cognates, reading fluency Highlights What is already known about this topic: • Bilinguals process language non-selectively. • Cognates are known to co-activate the non-target language, with bilinguals processing cognates more efficiently than non-cognates. • Children from a language minority background demonstrate consistently lower reading achievement compared with their majority language peers. What this paper adds: • The presence of cognates inhibits oral reading fluency in bilinguals. • Cognates influence performance on an ecologically valid text-reading measure. Implications for theory, policy or practice: • Cognate effects are not always facilitatory. • Explicit cognate awareness training may be an effective instructional approach for bilingual readers. © 2018 UKLA. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI:10.1111/1467-9817.12263 Volume 00, Issue 00, 2018, pp 1–18