Bilingualism

Bilingual Lexical Development

Donny Norlander

Professor Zaring

Linguistics 135

15 December 2010

Donny Norlander

Professor Zaring

Linguistics 135

12/14/10

Bilingual Lexical Development

While it is often taken for granted, the process in which the mind retrieves and determines the words we say and think is a fundamental aspect of humanity; the exceedingly advanced way in which the human race communicates is in large part what separates us from all other organisms. The study of linguistics examines how the human mind learns, forms, and defines words. In this course we have learned that there exists a dictionary in the mind that contains all the morphemes an individual knows, called the mental lexicon. The mental lexicon is the location in the mind where words are formed from free and bound morphemes, essentially acting as language storage and development. In this paper, I will examine the idea that, in the mind of a bilingual, there are separate mental lexicons for the first language and the second language, as well as the idea that these lexicons develop and act interdependently and independently of each other. The articles written by Kennette et al. (2010), Sheng et al (2006), Marchman et al. (2008), and Namei (2004) will be examined and their ideas will be synthesized in order to develop this concept of bilingual lexical independence and interdependence and better understand linguistics as a whole.

In order to form full words, the mental lexicon has to extract free morphemes from the mental dictionary and attach bound morphemes and, in the case of compounds, other free morphemes. While this process is still debated, the generally accepted model for this mental word formation is the level-ordering process, where certain affixations and pluralizing happen at designated levels before it is churned out as a desired word (Gordon 1985). Because English affixation differs from French affixation, and French affixation is different than Chinese...