The Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Speech Production Process

The Bilingual Lemma Activation Model as a Comparative Approach to Codeswitching

“…The naturally occurring CS instances studied by Wei (2001bWei ( , 2002Wei ( , 2006b) provide sufficient evidence that lemma congruence between the languages involved must be checked at the level of lexical-conceptual structure, at the level of predicate-argument structure, and at the level of morphological realization patterns. If the lemmas of the EL are congruent or sufficiently congruent with the counterparts of the ML at each of these levels, they can be activated for the speaker to proceed with the bilingual mode for CS; otherwise, the speaker must take some compromise strategies for possible CS realization or go back to the monolingual mode.…”

“…For example, Tami/English: Ellaam confused-aa irundadu (Annamalai, 1989, p. 50) is an instance of CS where the English morpheme "confused" is switched into the Tami sentential frame Researchers like Poplack (1980), Joshi (1985), DiSciullo, Muysken and Singh (1986), Appel and Muysken (1987), Gardner-Chloros (1987), Azuma (1991), Myers-Scotton (1993), Grosjean (1997), Myers-Scotton (1997, 2005), MacSwan (2000MacSwan ( , 2009, Wei (2001bWei ( , 2002 have studied the phenomenon of CS from various perspectives. Most studies have focused on the analysis of specific grammatical structures of CS, that is, where in a sentence the speaker may switch from one linguistic variety to another and what linguistic items can be switched.…”

“…Adopting Levelt's (1989) speech production model, Myers-Scotton and Jake's (1995) bilingual language competence and production model and Wei's (2002) bilingual speech production model, Wei (2006aWei ( , 2006bWei ( , 2015 proposes the Bilingual Lemma Activation (BLA) Model to explain bilingual speech production involving CS. This model consists of four sequentially connected levels of speech production: the conceptual level → the lemma level → the functional level → the position level.…”

“…As the figure shows, lemmas in the mental lexicon, whether monolingual or bilingual, mediate between the CONCEPTUALIZER and the FORMULATOR (cf. Levelt, 1989;Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000;Wei, 2002 …”

“…As Richards (1976), Faerch and Kasper (1984), Talmy (1985), Ringbom (1987), Nation (1990, Wei (2001aWei ( , 2001bWei ( , 2002 and others have explained knowing a word means the ability to retrieve the word from the mental lexicon about its spelling and pronunciation, its meaning(s), its grammatical class and syntactic environment, its collocations and syntagmatic associations, its lexical and conceptual associations, and its registers. In speech production, speakers map what they intend to say onto words retrieved from lexical items currently stored in the mental lexicon.…”