ABSTRACT
CHANGING VIEWS ABOUT BILINGUALISM Two recent insights in the research on bilingualism are likely to put the issue of multiple language proficiency in the center of written word recognition for the coming years. The first is that a bilingual person is not equipped with two independent visual word recognition systems. That is, a bilingual cannot be thought of as the equivalent of two monolingual word recognizers living within the same;person. There are influences from the first language (L1) on word recognition in the second language (L2), but also from L2 on word recognition in L1, making an English-Dutch bilingual different from an English monolingual, even in the identification of English words. The second insight is that bilinguals are not a minority, so that a model of visual word processing that cannot account for second language processing is not a good model.
