The bilingual lexicon: Language-specific units in an integrated network

Abstract

Five experiments were conducted to evaluate hypotheses concerning lexical organization in bilinguals. Previous work has shown that the repetition effect in lexical decision is restricted to intralingual conditions for English and Hindi. Experiments 1–3 each involved 12 English—French bilinguals and demonstrated that a previous finding generalizes to more similar languages and orthographies (English and French) and that it is unaffected by mixed-language test conditions. The results also demonstrated that although interlingual transfer occurs in response to translative activity during encoding, transfer does not occur as a result of tasks which emphasize meaning rather than translation. Experiment 4 involved 12 English—Hindi bilinguals in a two-word lexical decision task with semantically related and unrelated words under pure and mixed-language conditions. The results confirmed Meyer and Ruddy's (1974, Bilingual word recognition: Organization and retrieval of a alternative lexical codes) unpublished report that semantic priming is present under mixed as well as pure language conditions, and further showed that when language is defined by orthography—as is the case for English and Hindi—there is no overall deficit for mixed-language conditions. Experiment 5 demonstrated that for interlingual semantic priming to occur under successive presentation conditions, the related concepts must follow one another immediately. The overall pattern of results suggests that although the unit of lexical representation in bilinguals is language specific, the units function in an integrated network.