Lexical Access in Bilinguals

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate aspects of bilingual representation and processing as demonstrated in a word translation and translation recognition tasks. Two groups of Bulgarian-English bilinguals participated in the experiment, translating words to and from their native language. The results showed a reversed concreteness effect in backward translation for both groups and faster processing of concrete words in forward translation only for the highly proficient group, something which is in agreement with the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), which posits lexical-level mediation in backward translation and higher reliance on lexical links in less proficient bilinguals. In addition, an interaction between cognate status and language was observed in the highly proficient group, which was interpreted as reflecting not only easier and faster identification of L1 words, but also orthographic specifics and interaction between the orthographical and phonological levels.