Bilingual Lexical Activation in Sentence and Non-sentence Context: A Study of Cross-language Lexical Processing

Abstract

Research on word recognition across languages has gained popularity in recent years, due to  its overall bearing on the psycholinguistic account of language acquisition. To this end, this study  was an attempt to demonstrate the differential influences of L2 proficiency, and type of context on  the lexical recognition and retrieval of bilinguals. For this purpose, ten participants who were native  speakers of Persian and were learning English at the two distinct levels of elementary and advanced  were requested to recite two texts, one in Persian and one in English, which were specifically modified for the current research purpose. The results revealed that while advanced learners were  better performers on L2 lexis retrieval, their bare word recognition in L1 lagged behind in latency from elementary learners.