Bilingual Memory and Hierarchical Models

Abstract

Do bilinguals represent their two languages in one or two memory stores? Consider a word such as loz'e. This word elicits certain associations pertaining to relationships or emotions involving objects, things, or persons, especially for a monolingual speaker of English. Now, consider tliis same concept in a bilingual setting. Docs the concept of "love" carry information regarding its translation equivalent of aruor (e.g., the fact that in Spanish this concept is used primarily to show emotions to persons, but not to animals or objects)? Early researchers addressed this question at a general level by posing that there are separate memory stores if the two languages are learned in different settings (e.g., home vs. school), but a common memory store if the languages are learned simultaneously in the same setting (Ervin & Osgood, 1954). Recent research, however, has addressed this classic question by focusing more closely on how the Recommended Reading

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