Conceptual and Lexical Development in Second Language Acquisition

Lexical and conceptual representation in bilingual memory for both novice and expert bilinguals was examined in a series of three experiments. In Experiment 1a, monolingual English speakers learned a set of Spanish–English translations and were then tested using a translation recognition task. Response times to orthographically related foils were longer than response times to unrelated words. Lexical interference was also found to a lesser extent for expert bilinguals. In Experiment 1b, semantically related foils also produced interference, but the interference was greatest for expert bilingual participants. A bilingual version of the Stroop color-word task was used in Experiment 2, and novice and expert bilinguals each demonstrated Stroop effects both within and between languages. The results of all three experiments indicate that both conceptual and lexical links are formed for second language words, even after a single learning session. These results call into question the asymmetrical model of bilingual memory proposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994) which suggests that novice bilinguals rely exclusively on lexical representations when first acquiring a second language.