Lexical access in bilingual speakers: What's the (hard) problem?

By Matthew Finkbeiner, Tamar H. Gollan, Alfonso Caramazza. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2006

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Models of bilingual speech production generally assume that translation equivalent lexical nodes share a common semantic representation. Though this type of architecture is highly desirable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, it could create difficulty at the point of lexical selection. If two translation equivalent lexical nodes are activated to roughly equal levels every time that their shared semantic representation becomes activated, the lexical selection mechanism should find it difficult to “decide” between the two (the “hard problem”) – yet in some cases bilinguals benefit from the presence of a translation equivalent “competitor”. In this article, we review three models that have been proposed as solutions to the hard problem. Each of these models has difficulty accounting for the full range of findings in the literature but we suggest that these shortcomings stem from their acceptance of the assumption that lexical selection is competitive. We argue that without this assumption each proposal is able to provide a full account of the empirical findings. We conclude by suggesting that the simplest of these proposals should be rejected before more complicated models are considered.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98de5f2536a24adb6f3466d32a0ced16d2629be6

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Citations in the corpus

Language switching in picture naming: What asymmetric switch costs (do not) tell us about inhibition in bilingual speech planning (2013, background): “3 Note that Macizo and colleagues were using a framework that assumes lexical competition between languages, but see Costa et al., 1999; Finkbeiner et al., 2006a, for alternate proposals that do not assume lexical competition between languages.”
What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency?: The dual-task analogy (2010, background): “Despite such experimental results, it may be premature to abandon the idea of selection by competition (cf. Finkbeiner et al., 2006).”
Control mechanisms in bilingual language production: Neural evidence from language switching studies (2008, background): “…of speaking in the second language (L2) (cf. de Bot & Schreuder, 1993; Green, 1998; Roelofs, 2003); between lemmas in different languages (Green, 1998) or between word forms or their response (Finkbeiner et al., 2006) or at more than one site (Green, 1986, 1998; Kroll, Bobb, & Wodniecka, 2006).”
Finding le mot juste: Differences between bilingual and monolingual children's lexical access in comprehension and production* (2009, background): “Researchers are not in agreement as to whether bilingual adults activate both their languages in production tasks or not (see Lee and Williams, 2001; Costa, 2004; Finkbeiner et al., 2006; Gollan et al., 2008; see also Mahon, Costa, Peterson, Vargas and Caramazza, 2007).”