Lexical processing in bilinguals and multilinguals: The word selection problem

Abstract

This chapter considers a number of linguistic factors that appear to help the word selection process in visual word recognition by multilinguals: item related characteristics having to do with neighborhood density, language-specific cues, language distance, and script type; and linguistic context aspects having to do with morphological, syntactic, and language membership information. The theoretical analysis suggests that multilinguals do not require any special processing mechanisms to solve the word selection problem they are faced with during reading. A multilingual framework for relating various aspects of word identification and task/decision factors (extending the BIA+ model) is discussed.