Dual Lexical Activation in Bilinguals: a Tale of Two Verbs

Abstract

This study investigates the lexical organisation in the bilingual brain by the hand of an information theoretical approach. Reaction times of English-Dutch bilingual participants in response to high and low entropy verb paradigms were measured and compared to the performance of monolingual speakers of English. By selecting verbs that have different entropy values across the bilinguals' languages, it was possible to measure if both language were activated during lexical decision making. The results seem to indicate that, in the bilingual brain, the inflected forms of English verbs and their Dutch counterparts are stored in a single paradigm that becomes fully active during lexical decision making.