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The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals’ L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., piano) and homographs (e.g., pan)] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals living in a bilingual community (Experiment 1) and with intermediate proficiency Spanish–English bilinguals living in a monolingual community (Experiment 2). To determine the influence of sentence constraint on cross-language activation, the critical words and their matched controls were inserted in low- and high-constraint sentences. In low-constraint sentences significant cognate facilitation was observed, suggesting that both languages were active and influencing processing. In high-constraint sentences, the effects of cognate facilitation were eliminated. This interaction …