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Bilingualism: A framework for understanding the mental lexicon
Edited by Maya Libben, Mira Goral and Gary Libben
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 6] 2017
► pp. 103–122

Non-selective language activation and bilingualism as the default mental lexicon

The current chapter takes the approach that the default mental lexicon is the bilingual mental lexicon. We present a subset of models from the bilingual research literature and argue that such models could be adapted to simultaneously explain multilingual and monolingual language functioning. We specifically focus on how these models address the issue of selective vs. non-selective language access in the multilingual language user and discuss how these conceptual paradigms can be applied to human language processing in general. We focus specifically on three factors that modulate selective/non-selective access: (1) lexical features (2) language dominance and (3) semantic context.

Article outline
  • 1.The impact of lexical features on selective vs. non-selective language activation
    • 1.1The online processing of interlingual homographs
    • 1.2The online processing of cognate words
  • 2.Models of bilingual language processing
    • 2.1Grosjean’s Language Mode Hypothesis
    • 2.2The Bilingual Activation Plus Model (BIA+)
  • 3.The effect of language dominance on non-selective access
  • 4.The effect of context on non-selective bilingual access
    • 4.1The role of language context
    • 4.2The role of sentence context
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 20 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.6.05lib
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