Bilingual speakers tend to frequently experience language transfer when their languages are typologically closely related, which suggests that similarity between languages is likely to play an important role in the transfer process. In this paper, we explore how three different types of similarity affect transfer of light verb constructions (LVCs, such as take a walk, set an alarm) from Dutch to German, namely (a) similarity to existing constructions, (b) surface similarity based on whether the noun in the LVC is a cognate in Dutch and German, and (c) similarity in the light verb’s usage contexts. The results suggest that more similarity does indeed facilitate transfer, in that speakers experienced more transfer (a) when the LVC was similar to an existing German LVC, (b) when the nouns in Dutch and German were cognates, and (c) when the verbs were used in similar contexts across languages. This is reflected both in the speakers’ language use as well as in their acceptability ratings of transferred constructions. Moreover, the results suggest that having a construction that is highly similar in Dutch and German can even lead to less acceptance of existing alternatives that happen to be less similar. Overall, the results thus show that speakers both add constructions that did not previously exist in German and drop constructions that did previously exist, based on similarity between constructions in Dutch and German, ultimately resulting in more convergence across their languages.