ABSTRACT
Bilinguals are capable of understanding and speaking two different languages. Interestingly, behavioral and neural evidence suggests that, even when only one language is being used overtly, both languages are being accessed in parallel (Blumenfeld & Marian, 2013; Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdés Kroff, 2012; Kroll, Gullifer, & Rossi, 2013; Marian & Spivey, 2003a). This means that, when listening to words from a single language, words from the bilingual’s other language also become activated. For example, a Korean-English bilingual may look for fl owers when asked “Did you see the goat?” because the word “goat” means fl ower in Korean (꽃, /k͈ot̚/). In order to correctly select “goat” from the mental lexicon, the bilingual must use auditory and visual cues from the available context (e.g., the sentence is in English, and no fl owers are nearby). As this process of selection is continuously experienced across a variety of situations, it may have long-term consequences for the cognitive system.
