Abstract:
Research within the domain of bilingualism has grown exponentially within the past three decades, providing greater insight into the linguistic capacity and mental processes surrounding the bilingual memory system. In general, we know that bilinguals tend to have smaller vocabularies in each of their languages (Oller and Eilers 2002; Perani et al. 2003), they are slower to name pictures (Kaushanskaya and Marian 2007; Roberts et al. 2002), and they show a higher incidence of tip-of-the tongue states as compared with monolingual populations (Gollan and Acenas a2004). Furthermore, many bilinguals have different ages of acquisition for each of their languages, and semantic representations of individual words often differ across languages (based on varying social and linguistic contexts), both of which greatly affect lexical organization.
