How second language learners represent and process cognates throughout development is an interesting area of inquiry to teachers, researchers, and learners alike. Cognates, as opposed to other word translations, are unique to learn in L2 because they share form (i.e. orthography, phonology, or morphology) and meaning, (i.e. semantics) with their L1 counterparts, essentially creating a class of words with special properties in bilingual memory. These special properties have yielded both facilitatory and inhibitory effects on bilingual visual word recognition in experimental conditions (Dijkstra et al. (1999)), as well as a lively debate on the nature of these results, (Sánchez-Casas & García-Albea (2005)). Although these experiments and debates have been productive, no consensus on the nature of the results has been reached, and almost no investigation has been conducted on how these effects develop in an L2 learner or heritage speaker.The purpose of this study is to address issues of lexical access and organization of cognates among both heritage speakers and L2 learners of Spanish in the United States. More specifically, we examined the effects that language (i.e. orthography and phonology) and cognition (e.g. intelligence, working memory, attention, and other cognitive variables) present to these populations in Cognate Recognition of English-Spanish cognates in Spanish. To better understand cognate recognition among these populations, we employed experimental and self-reporting paradigms designed to assess both language and cognitive related variables. Results show that cognates can be subdivided by orthographic and phonological features to form distinct perceptual categories in all groups of participants. Although the relationship is complex, in most cases orthography does facilitate reaction time in relation to phonology. Furthermore, individual differences do change throughout L2 lexical development and a few significant predictors of Cognate Recognition in Spanish are: attention, English vocabulary knowledge, spelling ability in English, number of L2 classes taken, and amount of time since last L2 class was taken.