How are words organized in the bilingual mind? How are they linked to concepts? How do bi- and multilinguals process words in their multiple languages? Contributions to this volume offer up-to-date answers to these questions and provide a detailed introduction to interdisciplinary approaches used to investigate the bilingual lexicon.

How does a human acquire, comprehend, produce and control multiple languages with just the power of one mind? What are the cognitive consequences of being a bilingual? These are just a few of the intriguing questions at the core of studying bilingualism from psycholinguistic and neurocognitive perspectives. Bringing together some of the world's leading experts in bilingualism, cognitive psychology and language acquisition, The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Processing explores these questions by presenting a clear overview of current theories and findings in bilingual processing. This comprehensive handbook is organized around overarching thematic areas including theories and methodologies, acquisition and development, comprehension and representation, production, control, and the cognitive consequences of bilingualism. The handbook serves as an informative overview for researchers interested in cognitive bilingualism and the logic of theoretical and experimental approaches to language science. It also functions as an instrumental source of readings for anyone interested in bilingual processing.

In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked. The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.

This book proposes the Bilingual Lemma Activation Model as a method for exploring the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon in both speech production and language acquisition. This model claims that the bilingualâ (TM)s two languages are not equally activated in code-switching; one playing a crucial role in grammatical frame building, and the other being activated at a lexical level due to psycholinguistic reasons. To test this model, the book analyzes bilingual speech data from naturally occurring intrasentential code-switching instances involving various language pairs. A second claim of this model is that code-switching naturally occurs because certain lemmas underlying some particular lexical items stored in the bilingual mental lexicon are language-specific, and such lemmas are in contact in bilingual speech. To further test this model, second language acquisition data are analyzed here to describe and explain sources of language transfer at the level of abstract lexical structure. Thus, from some psycholinguistic perspectives, this model views bilingual speech involving code-switching and interlanguage performance data as predictable outcomes of bilingual systems in contact. This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in both theoretical and applied linguistics.

This volume reflects a consensus that the investigation of words in the mind offers a unique opportunity to understand both human language ability and general human cognition. It brings together key perspectives on the fundamental nature of the representation and processing of words in the mind. This thematic volume covers a wide range of views on the fundamental nature of representation and processing of words in the mind and a range of views on the investigative techniques that are most likely to reveal that nature. It provides an overview of issues and developments in the field. It uncovers the processes of word recognition. It develops new models of lexical processing.

In the world today, bilingualism is more common than monolingualism. Thus, the default mental lexicon may in fact be the bilingual lexicon. More than ever, social and technological innovation have created a situation in which lexical knowledge may change dramatically throughout an individual’s lifetime. This book offers a new perspective for the understanding of these phenomena and their consequences for the representation of words in the mind and brain. Contributing authors are leaders in the field who provide a re-analysis of key assumptions and a re-focusing of research. They bring new insights and new findings that advance the understanding of both bilingualism and the mental lexicon. This volume serves to generate new directions and advances in bilingualism research.

This volume does not offer a complex perspective of the L2 lexicon, but rather represents a sustained attempt to answer some very basic questions clustered around the relationship between the L2 mental lexicon and the L1 mental lexicon. It provides a review of L1 and L2 lexical research issues such as similarities and differences between the conditions of L1 and L2 acquisition, the respective roles of forming and meaning in L1 and L2 processing, and the degree of separation/integration between L1 and L2 lexical operations.

How are words organized in the bilingual mind? How are they linked to concepts? How do bi- and multilinguals process words in their multiple languages? Contributions to this volume offer up-to-date answers to these questions and provide a detailed introduction to interdisciplinary approaches used to investigate the bilingual lexicon.

The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism presents a comprehensive introduction to the foundations of bilingualism, covering language processing, language acquisition, cognition and the bilingual brain. This thorough introduction to the psycholinguistics of bilingualism is accessible to non-specialists with little previous exposure to the field Introduces students to the methodological approaches currently employed in the field, including observation, experimentation, verbal and computational modelling, and brain imaging Examines spoken and written language processing, simultaneous and successive language acquisition, bilingual memory and cognitive effects, and neurolinguistic and neuro-computational models of the bilingual brain Written in an accessible style by two of the field’s leading researchers, together with contributions from internationally-renowned scholars Featuring chapter-by-chapter research questions, this is an essential resource for those seeking insights into the bilingual mind and our current knowledge of the cognitive basis of bilingualism

Combining theory, psychological tests, and corpus, this book is an interdisciplinary study of the conceptual transfer of abstract nouns in the bilingual mental lexicon of professional translators, a treatise in philosophical linguistics, and a challenger of traditional ideas in the psychology of concepts. Not only does it shatter the common belief among cognitive scientists that abstract concepts are not researchable and cannot be subject to empirical investigation, it goes far beyond this to prove that abstract conceptssuch as science, language, religion, etc.are even more amenable to empirical research than concrete ones. It establishes a new paradigm in the relationship between language and cognition that allows each to be accessed through the other. Arguing that lexical-semantic analysis of concepts should precede psychological tasks, and supplying the tools therefore, it provides a new cognitive approach to lexical semantics and a new semantic approach to cognitive psychology. While it addresses itself to all these topics drastically and untraditionally, the major topic of this book still is the conceptual transfer in the bilingual mental lexicon of English-Arabic translators.