The processing and impact of lexical representations on bilingual knowledge

Abstract

Vocabulary in human communication is normally used in association with encyclopedic knowledge. Descriptions of how this encyclopedic information deep in our minds can be used and linked to single words appear in the work of different cognitive authors. From this point of view lexical units are merely points of access, and that therefore “concepts are simply entrenched cognitive routines”. This is the kind of description proposed by psychologists and computer scientists, with models that involve semantic networking and activation as important principles explaining the link between words and encyclopedic knowledge dynamically. The suggestion that knowledge structures and the individual concepts associated with them are dynamically constructed together with “schemata” theories according to which everything we know about the world is stored in large mental knowledge structures, make up an interesting knowledge model that can be applied in other fields. This knowledge model involved in human communication is even more interesting if we examine it as it is used in bilinguals. Current research suggests that bilingual memory is organized as a single distributed lexicon rather than as two separately accessible lexicons corresponding to each language. In this respect, it will be analyzed here how neurolinguistic evidence can throw some light onto the modeling of multilingual knowledge in other domains