  We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous
linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large
corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of
carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of
non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is
so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of
the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific
lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We
quantitatively analyze non-native lexical choice, highlighting cognate
facilitation as one of the important phenomena shaping the language of
non-native speakers.
