A COMPARISON OF BILINGUALS' LEXICAL PROCESSING IN THEIR TWO LANGUAGES

Abstract

Bilinguality literature abounds with evidence that both languages are activated in parallel in lexical processing and the wordsbelonging to two languages are stored in a shared lexicon. This accounts for interferences across languages, and slowerprocessing speed and lower accuracy rates when compared to monolingual lexical processing. This study investigates howbilinguals process words in both languages. In a lexical decision task, simultaneous bilinguals (N= 48) who acquired Englishand Turkish from birth were asked to decide if the visually presented letter strings were either real or non-words in Turkishand in English. Response times and accuracy were recorded via a software program and were statistically analyzed. Theresults showed that bilinguals processed real words faster and more accurately than non-words in both languages, and thatthere was no difference between languages in terms of speed and accuracy rates.