Lexical storage and retrieval in bilinguals

Abstract

A review of recent studies on the recognition of isolated words by bilinguals shows that this process is automatic and profoundly language non-selective. For example, upon the presentation of an ambiguous word form such as LIST, which exists in both English and Dutch (where it means "cream"), the associated representations in both languages become active. This happens even when it would be advantageous for the bilingual to suppress one reading of such interlingual homographs. Non-linguistic context factors, such as the demands of the task, the instruction, and participant strategies appear to affect the performance of bilingual participants indirectly, via a task / decision system. In contrast, when words are embedded in sentences, their identification process appears to be affected more directly by linguistic context, i.e. the syntactic, lexical, and semantic aspects of the preceding sentence.