ABSTRACT
How do bilinguals understand and speak words in each of their two languages? Research on the lexicon in the last two decades has produced one of the most profound observations about bilingualism: both languages are active and interacting even when only one language is in use and even when the bilingual's two languages differ in form. The parallel activation of the two languages creates an apparent problem for bilinguals when they comprehend and produce words in one language alone. But the solution to that problem reveals both the elegance of bilingualism and also the way that the presence of two or more languages can be used as a tool to reveal the workings of the mind and the brain. Bilinguals draw on cognitive resources to develop the means to regulate lexical retrieval to enable highly controlled language processing. In this chapter we consider the implications of these observations for understanding the architecture of the bilingual lexicon and the dynamics of cross-language interaction that result. We examine the way that this system comes online during early stages of language learning, how it functions once individuals achieve a high level of proficiency, and how variation in language experience comes to shape the outcomes of lexical processing.
