| This dissertation investigated two aspects of the bilingual lexicon: (a) the effect of instruction on the organization of the developing lexicon and (b) the information contained within the second language (L2) lexicon. In the first experiment, Native English speakers learned Spanish words via either translation lists (translation group) or picture-L2 word lists (picture group). Lexical processing was assessed with three tasks: (a) primed lexical decision, (b) translation recognition and (c) categorization. In the primed lexical decision task, there were three prime types: translation, semantic and unrelated. Only a translation priming effect was found, implicating lexical level links in L2 processing, in line with the word association model (Potter et al., 1984) and the revised hierarchical model (Knoll & Stewart, 1994). There were no statistically significant differences between the two groups on any of the three tasks. A secondary finding of the first experiment was that the amount of meaning overlap between the two languages affected the speed with which words were accessed. In line with De Groot's (1992) conceptual features model, words with more meaning overlap between languages were accessed more quickly than words with less overlap in meaning, evidenced by faster reaction times on all three tasks.; While research on monolingual language production and processing has led to the positing of different levels of lexical representation, investigations of the bilingual lexicon have mainly focused on the relationship between the two languages. To explore whether the L2 learner develops an L2 lemma-level representation, the second experiment investigated whether L2 learners access a noun's gender automatically. Advanced L2 learners of Spanish completed a picture-naming task, with written distractors. The distractors differed in semantic relatedness and gender congruency. There was a clear indication of a gender interference effect when the pictures and the distractors were semantically related, but not when they were unrelated. This gender interference effect suggests that the L2 learner is able to process the L2 automatically during language production, having established a fully integrated L2 lexicon. |
