ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the most important theoretical issues and findings of empirical research about lexical encoding and the organization of the bilingual lexicon in a second language. Weinreich argued that speakers of a second language might represent words in a compound, coordinate, or subordinate manner. This means that in compound storage, the conceptual representations of a given word are shared, and the speaker has two words for the same concept in the languages spoken. Students who typically learn the second language in a foreign language environment and in a classroom situation might store many of the words in a subordinate manner, through associating L2 words with their L1 equivalents. In model, first a conceptual representation of the message to be conveyed is generated. This conceptual plan sends activation to the lexicon and to an attentional system that controls language processing, which is called the supervisory attentional system (SAS).
