ABSTRACT
A bilingual Stroop task was used to examine how bilinguals access and store words in two languages. The goal of this research was to examine if language similarity and language proficiency have influences on the representation of bilingual information. We tested bilinguals of similar languages (i.e., English-German and German-English) arid bilinguals of dissimilar languages (i.e., English-Greek and Chinese-English). Some participants were fluent in both languages; others were only at an intermediate level of proficiency in the second language. The results indicate that beginners access words in the foreign language via the corresponding word in the mother tongue. The highly proficient bilinguals of two dissimilar languages seem to store the two corresponding words in two different dictionaries, which are connected only at the semantic level. The highly proficient bilinguals of two similar languages, on the other hand, experience considerable between-language interference, indicating that they do not separate the two dictionaries to the same extent as the bilinguals of two dissimilar languages. Implications for learning a second language are discussed.
