The paper opens with an evaluation of the BIA model of bilingual word recognition in the light of recent empirical evidence. After pointing out problems and omissions, a new model, called the BIA+, is proposed. Structurally, this new model extends the old one by adding phonological and semantic lexical representations to the available orthographic ones, and assigns a different role to the so-called language nodes. Furthermore, it makes a distinction between the effects of non-linguistic context (such as instruction and stimulus list composition) and linguistic context (such as the semantic and syntactic effects of sentence context), based on a distinction between the word identi®cation system itself and a task/ decision system that regulates control. At the end of the paper, the generalizability of the BIA+ model to different tasks and modalities is discussed.

We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that the SUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times of the British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and the SUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencies, we also present measures of contextual diversity part-of-speech specific word frequencies, word frequencies in children programmes, and word bigram frequencies, giving researchers of British English access to the full range of norms recently made available for other languages. Finally, we introduce a new measure of word frequency, the Zipf scale, which we hope will stop the current misunderstandings of the word frequency effect.

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Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the target "apricot"). Priming effects were not influenced by whether or not absolute, length-dependent position was respected (e.g., "a-ric-t" vs. "arict"/"ar-i-ct"). Position of overlap of relative-position primes (e.g., apric-apricot; ricot-apricot; arict-apricot) was found to have little influence on the size of priming effects, particularly in conditions (i.e., 33 ms prime durations) where there was no evidence for phonological priming. The results constrain possible schemes for letter position coding.