Lexical access in Croatian–English unbalanced bilinguals: a cross–linguistic study

Sa？etak In Croatia, early exposure to English is enabled through early language learning programs as well as the media. The media plays an important role in incidental language learning. This, along with the fact that daily exposure to English is measured in hours, indicates that its status as a foreign language is changing, which offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between language exposure, level of proficiency and lexical access. The main goal of this study is to explore lexical access in Croatian speakers of English, with different levels of proficiency. The investigation consisted of a questionnaire on language use and exposure, proficiency test and an experiment in which cross–language priming was combined with a lexical decision task. The experiment explored whether priming effect would occur in two conditions: associative and semantic relatedness and translation equivalence, in both language directions. Semantic relationship between words elicits shorter reaction time, suggesting that sharing similar meaning speeds up the recognition process in words from two languages. Even stronger effect was observed in the case of translation equivalents. Surprisingly, proficiency level was not significant. The results are discussed in the light of the Revised Hierarchical Model and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model +