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Words and their usage: Commentary on the special issue on the bilingual mental lexicon

This special issue devoted to the bilingual mental lexicon focuses upon the consequences of second language (L2) vocabulary learning for bilingual lexicosemantic representation. Acquisition and representation are inseparable. So theories of development that are blind to the nature of the mature cognitive system are lacking, 1 as are theories of representation that ignore how this came about. 2 The study of cognition, its etymology notwithstanding, has traditionally been more concerned with knowledge than the getting of knowledge. But the tide is changing. We realize that we can only properly understand the final state of fluent expertise if we understand its processes of development. Therefore, cognitive science is concerned with functional and neurobiological descriptions of the learning processes which, through exposure to representative experience, result in change, development, and the emergence of knowledge. Likewise, as reflected in the goals of this journal, the proper study of the mental lexicon is interdisciplinary, its interests spanning, inter alia, the representation of words in the mind, lexical processing and use, lexical development across the lifespan, and empirical descriptions of language usage, monolingual and multilingual alike, across languages. A psycholinguistic model which has been important in emphasizing the interactions in development between lexical and conceptual representations in the bi-Experimental work motivated by this model has shown that beginning bilinguals access the meaning of L2 words indirectly via their first language translation equivalents (L2 → L1 → Conceptual system), whereas proficient bilinguals, as a consequence of their considerable L2 usage, have entrenched direct connections to meaning (L2 → Conceptual system), and can access the meanings of L2 words without relying on their L1. As Barcroft and Sunderman point out however, much of this work has been system based rather than item-based, emphasizing lexical systems rather than words.