In this article I examine cognates, lexical items from different languages which are identified by bilinguals as somehow being 'the same thing'. Cognates have at least 4 essential properties: 1) they are always structural units; 2) they are words; 3) words paired may be but need not be semantically identical; 4) there is always some kind of formal resemblance between cognates. I argue that these properties can be explained in terms of a particular model of lexical activation and word recognition, namely the Cohort Model. I also take up the question of defining cognates for psycho linguistic purposes, and argue against using traditional extensional definitions based on etymology and genetic relatedness. I argue for defining cognates in terms of their structural representations and the processes which activate and select them.
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