The Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Speech Production Process

doi:10.1006/brln.2001.2557

Brain and Language

Volume 81, Issues 1–3, April 2002, Pages 691-707

https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.2001.2557 Get rights and content

Abstract

The Chinese/English intrasentential code-switching data provide evidence that the bilingual mental lexicon involves language contact between language-specific semantic/pragmatic feature bundles. Lemmas in the mental lexicon are tagged for specific languages and contain semantic, syntactic, and morphological information about lexemes. In a bilingual mode, the speaker makes choices at the preverbal level of lexical-conceptual structure, and these choices activate the lemmas in the mental lexicon for the speaker's preverbal message to be morphosyntactically realized at the functional level of predicate-argument structure. The result will be language-specific surface forms at the positional level of morphological realization patterns. The languages involved in the bilingual's mixed speech are never equally activated, with one language projecting the sentential frame and the other supplying a particular type of morphemes for the speaker's communicative intentions.

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Worldwide, it is estimated that about half of the population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2010). Psycholinguistic research on bilingualism has flourished in recent decades, with investigations focusing on the mechanisms allowing bilinguals to switch effortlessly between their two languages (e.g., Poplack, 1980; Clyne, 1987; Milroy & Muysken, 1995; Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000; Moreno, Federmeier, & Kutas, 2002), the organization of the bilingual mental lexicon (e.g., De Bot & Schreuder, 1993; Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Green, 1998; Wei, 2002; Pavlenko, 2009), and the potential cognitive advantages of bilingualism (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004; Costa, Hernández, Costa-Faidella, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009; Prior & MacWhinney, 2010; Hilchey & Klein, 2011; Sebastián-Gallés, Albareda-Castellot, Weikum, & Werker, 2012; Paap & Greenberg, 2013). However, the prevalence of bilingualism has consequences that extend beyond the bilingual individuals themselves.
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^☆: Address correspondence and reprint requests to Longxing Wei, Linguistics Department, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043. Fax: (973) 655-7909. E-mail: [email protected].

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Regular ArticleThe Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Speech Production Process☆

Abstract

Journal of Memory and Language

Cognition

Brain and Language

Brain and Language

Cognition

The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect

MIT working papers in linguistics

A bilingual production model: Levelt's ‘speaking’ model adapted

Applied Linguistics

Word production and the bilingual lexicon

A spreading activation theory of retrieval in sentence production

Psychological Review

A unified theory of syntactic categories

Sentence processing

Toward a model of L2 comprehension and production

Processing mixed languages: Issues, findings, and models

The architecture of the Language Faculty

Intrasentential codeswitching and pronouns: On the categorial status of functional elements

Linguistics

Regular Article
The Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Speech Production Process☆