The English-Spanish Cognates in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan Imagery Norms Rated for Orthographic Transparency Cognates are words which are orthographically, semantically, and syntactically identical (or similar) in two languages. The English and Spanish languages share more than 20,000 cognates, many of which are important academic vocabulary words. Research has shown that cognates facilitate vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension for language learners (when compared to non-cognate words). In Experiment 1, orthographic transparency ratings for 440 Spanish -English cognate nouns drawn from the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) imagery norms were collected from 41 students in a literacy education class at a western university. The participants were presented with lists of English–Spanish cognate word pairs presented side-by-side and were asked to rate the orthographic similarity of the pairs on a Likert scale of 1 to 7. The analysis of the ratings suggests that the earlier an English word deviates from its Spanish equivalent (its “point of differentiation”), the lower the cognate transparency rating it is assigned (extending the generalizability of the “initial letter effect” previously reported). In Experiment 2, we validated these ratings by having new participants quickly judge whether a pair of words were or were not cognates. We found that reaction times were strongly correlated with transparency ratings and the points of differentiation, lending support to the usefulness of the transparency ratings obtained in Experiment 1.