11. Bilingual Memory

Summary

This chapter provides a general overview of some of the major theories psycholinguistics have employed to explain how bilinguals store and access information from and between their two languages. It starts with reviews on early theoretical formulations, and goes on to evaluate Paivio's bilingual dual coding theory, and the highly influential hierarchical models that assume a bilingual memory structure composed of language-specific mental lexicons and a shared conceptual representation. Next, it critically evaluates the distributed model of bilingual memory that poses a bilingual memory structure based on word type. The chapter concludes by evaluating the possibility that bilingual lexical access might be language-nonselective in which the bilingual's two languages continuously interact and compete for activation during the language comprehension process.