A comparison of bilinguals' lexical processing in their two languages

Bilinguality literature abounds with evidence that both languages are activated in parallel in lexical processing and the words belonging to two languages are stored in a shared lexicon. This accounts for interferences across languages, and slower processing speed and lower accuracy rates when compared to monolingual lexical processing. This study investigates how bilinguals process words in both languages. In a lexical decision task, simultaneous bilinguals (N= 48) who acquired English and Turkish from birth were asked to decide if the visually presented letter strings were either real or non-words in Turkish and in English. Response times and accuracy were recorded via a software program and were statistically analyzed. The results showed that bilinguals processed real words faster and more accurately than non-words in both languages, and that there was no difference between languages in terms of speed and accuracy rates