The role of learning on bilinguals’ lexical architecture: Beyond separated vs. integrated lexicons

Abstract

How are the two lexicons of a bilingual represented and how do they interact during language processing? These questions are central to bilingualism and have been the topics of a large number of studies. Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, De Korte & Rekke (in press) put forward a model that tries to capture people's behavior in several tasks mostly involving reading, with the exception of word translation. A praise-worthy feature of the model is that it is computationally implemented following a local-connectionist architecture. The model is then used to quantitatively account for reaction time patterns on various tasks, with considerable success.