Abstract EN:

How does a bilingual individual go about identifying words in his or her two languages? what is the relationship between these two languages in the mental lexicon? in an attempt to provide a preliminary answer to these questions, a series of seven experiments was run. The first two experiments aimed at elucidating some of the factors linked to word identification speed. The performances of beginning and skilled bilinguals on tasks related to single-word decoding were assessed in both the first and the second language. The second series of experiments examined the processes underlying bilingual lexical access in somewhat greater detail. In these studies we addressed questions such as the overlap of the two languages at the semantic level, the role played by the language of the word itself during identification, and the processing of a class of less often studied words, these being spelled-out numbers. The results of these studies led us to the development of a model of bilingual lexical access in which it is assumed that the process by which a word is recognized involves two kinds of processes, the first being an automatic activation process, and the second a more central verification process operating on the outcome of the first process. The obtained experimental results lend support to the proposed model.