Organization of the bilingual lexicon: Categorical versus alphabetic cuing in Russian-English bilinguals

Abstract

The mechanism by which Russian native speakers store and retrieve Russian and English words from lexical memory was investigated in two experiments in which fluency of retrieval was compared for categorical and alphabetic cues. We hypothesized that fluency in Russian would be higher for categorical cues but that fluency in English would be higher for alphabetical cues because native language words would have been stored by meaning, while second-language words would have been stored according to dictionary usage. Subjects retrieved more Russian than English words with categorical cues, but their retrieval was the same for the two languages with alphabetic cues. In addition, fluency was greater overall with alphabetical than categorical cues. We attributed the greater fluency in Russian with the categorical cues to the early age at which the concepts were acquired, which made them more accessible in the native language. These findings support the idea that access codes for words may vary depending upon how they are originally learned.