Bilingual visual word recognition in sentence context

Researchers in cognitive science have a long history of answering questions about the nature of mental processes through the examination of word recognition. For example, one of the best-known connectionist models of human cognition (the Interactive Activation framework) is a model of word identi? cation (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1988). Research on word recognition has demonstrated that lexical retrieval is a highly interactive process, characterized by parallel activation of competing representations before resolution to a single lexical entry (see also, for example, Coltheart, accompanying volume, Chapter 1; Sibley and Kello, accompanying volume, Chapter 2; Forster, accompanying volume, Chapter 3; Balota et al., accompanying volume, Chapter 5; Grainger and Dufau, accompanying volume, Chapter 8; Halderman, Ashby, and Perfetti, accompanying volume, Chapter 10; Feldman and Weber, this volume, Chapter 1). However, models and theories of word identi? cation focused exclusively on processing within a monolingual lexicon despite the fact that most of the world’s population is bilingual. This began to change in the 1990s in which there was a sudden heightened interest in examining the nature of lexical co-activation across languages. The central question of interest was whether lexical activation proceeds selectively by language such that only competitors in the target language can be activated. The answer, based on much evidence accrued throughout the 1990s to today, is a resounding ‘No’.