A Comparison of Lexical Processing in Monolinguals and Bilinguals

Abstract

Bilinguals have twice as many words in their mental lexicon as compared to monolinguals. There means that bilinguals are slower and less accurate in lexical processing when compared to monolinguals. This study investigates whether Turkish-English bilinguals (n= 48) differ from Turkish monolinguals (n= 53) in their perception of Turkish words. Both groups were instructed to decide if the visually presented Turkish words were either real words or nonwords in a lexical decision task Response times and the accuracy of the answers were recorded. In line with the results in the literature, it was shown that bilinguals were slower and less accurate than monolinguals in processing Turkish words. The results were discussed in the light of psycholinguistic models of lexical processing.