ABSTRACT
This chapter explores of the issue of how the mental lexicon is constructed and organized when more than one language is in question. It looks at the issues of similarity/difference and integration/separation in respect of first language and second language lexical organization and processing. This semantic aspect of the lexical challenge is obviously vitally important. Extracting word-units from the speech stream would be of little benefit to the child in communicative terms without the attachment to the units in question of appropriate meanings. Turning now to the question of the relationship between the child's late 'babbles' and first words, our first step in this context must be to situate babbling in the general scheme of things. W. Levelt's examines highly influential blueprint for the speaker, says about lexical processing, and focuses on two general perspectives on language processing, the modularity hypothesis and connectionism. The cohort model, like the logogen model assumes that available contextual information assists lexical processing.
