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Description: A central finding of bilingual research is that cognates⸺words that share semantic, phonological, and orthographic characteristics across languages⸺are processed faster than non-cognate words. However, it remains unclear whether cognate facilitation effects are solely reliant on identical cognates, or whether facilitation is best described on a continuum of cross-language orthographic and phonological similarity. In two experiments, German-English bilinguals read identical cognates, close cognates, and non-cognates in a lexical decision task and a sentence-reading task while their eye movements were tracked. Participants read the stimuli in their L1 German and L2 English. Converging results found comparable facilitation effects of identical and close cognates compared to non-cognates. Cognate facilitation could be described as a continuous linear effect of cross-language orthographic similarity on lexical decision accuracy and latency, as well as eye movement measures. Cross-language phonological similarity modulated the continuous cognate facilitation effect in single word recognition, but not in sentence processing.