It is well attested that bilingual participants are faster to recognize and recall words that are cognates across their languages than non-cognates (see van Hell & Tanner, 2012 for review). At least among highly proficient bilinguals, this effect emerges even when completing a task in their L1 (e.g., Pelzl et al., 2025; van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002). Separate from the cognate effect, another well-known effect in this literature is that monolingual and bilingual speakers are faster to recognize and produce words associated with positive emotions (e.g., chocolate) and slower to recognize and produce words associated with negative emotions (e.g., ambulance) relative to neutral words (e.g., lightbulb; see Zhong et al., 2026 for review).

However, no research to date has investigated either phenomenon among populations currently living under wartime conditions. Using lexical decision and word recall tasks, the present study investigates bilingual cognate and bilingual affective word processing among Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals currently living in Ukraine. All participants were proficient speakers of Ukrainian and Russian, having acquired both languages from birth or as young children.

Contrary to previous research, participants were significantly slower to recognize Ukrainian-Russian cognates than Ukrainian non-cognates and there was no benefit for cognates during word recall. With affective processing, participants were faster to recognize positive words than either negative or neutral words in the lexical decision task and they recalled more positive and negative words than neutral words on the word recall task, paralleling previous research. Carrie Jackson will discuss how these results do (and do not) suggest a role for external circumstances (i.e., war) in our understanding of bilingual word processing.