Spreading activation, a process where similar concepts are activated when their neighbors are activated, is a widely accepted model of lexical access. It has been shown in both bilingual and monolingual individuals, with bilinguals showing activation in both languages during language research tasks. Multiple studies have shown that bilinguals recognize cognate words more quickly than non-cognate words, especially identical cognates, which produce the strongest effect. These effects occurred even when the participants knew ahead of time what language the target words would be in. Despite the specific language contexts, both languages are activated, showing that lexical access is not language-specific and that top-down processing is important in lexical access. Findings suggest that the amount of activation that occurred cross-linguistically was related to the similarity between the translation equivalents of the languages.