Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Non-cognate French-English homographs, i.e., identical lexical items with distinct meanings in French and in English, such as pain, four, main, etc., are used to study the organization of bilingual memory. Bilingual lexical access is initially shown to be compatible with a parallel search through independent lexicons, where the search speed through each lexicon depends on the level of activation of the associated language. Particular attention is paid to reaction times to "unbalanced" homographs, i.e., homographs with a high frequency in one language and a low frequency in the other. It is claimed that the independent dual-lexicon model is functionally equivalent to an activation-based competitive-access model that can be used to account for priming data that the dual-lexicon model has difficulty handling.