The Bilingual Mental Lexicon

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 bilingual’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.