•Balanced bilingual children demonstrate cognate facilitation in both languages.•Semantic-to-orthographic feedback is used from the beginning of reading acquisition.•Cognate effects are driven by language proficiency rather than by print experience.•No processing differences for homographs between languages of balanced bilinguals.•Balanced bilingual children resemble bilingual adults more than child L2-learners. We investigated whether beginning bilingual readers activate orthographic as well as semantic representations in both of their languages while reading in one of them. Balanced bilingual third graders who were learning to read concurrently in German and English completed two lexical decision tasks, one in each language, including cognates, false friends, and matched control words. Results showed a processing advantage for cognates over controls in both languages, indicating that the facilitation effect is driven by the level of balanced language proficiency rather than by experience with print. Except for lower accuracy scores in German, false friends did not differ in their processing from controls, pointing to the presence of semantic-to-orthographic feedback already in the beginning of reading acquisition. Confirming assumptions by the bilingual interactive activation plus (BIA+) model as well as the revised hierarchical model (RHM), findings suggest that in their strategy to resolve orthographic ambiguity, balanced bilingual children are more comparable to bilingual adults than to child second-language (L2) learners.