De Organisatie Van Het Lexicon Bij Bilingualen

In the literature on the organisation of the bilingual lexicon, two closely related issues have played a major role. In the so-called independence-interdependence issue, the central question is: Do bilinguals have two separate storage and retrieval systems, one for each language, or is there just one common memory store? A second group of studies centers around the 'compound-coordinate' distinction: 'compound' bilinguals are supposed to have only one semantic system that serves for both languages, whereas on the other hand 'coordinate' bilinguals have a separate semantic system for each language. In order to resolve the above controversies researchers have employed different experimental techniques. Many of these studies have resulted in distinct and apparently contradictory conclusions. The main reason for these unclear results seems to be the defining of the level of language processing involved in these studies: the variety of experimental techniques used has caused an obvious incompatibility of the various results obtained. One other complication that has repeatedly been neglected within the exper-iments reported in the literature concerns the existence of individual differences in bilingual subjects. By studying the distinction between 'compound' and 'coordinate' bilingualism many investigators have demonstra-ted the relevence of its consequences for the selection of bilingual subjects to be used. Two experiments in which an attempt has been made to minimise the effect of some of the fundamental problems mentioned above, are globally discussed in the context of two models for the organisation of the monolingual lexicon (Forster, 1976; Morton, 1979). Within these experiments we investigated the effects of word-frequency and word-repetition within and between languages in respectively Dutch-English staff-members of the English-American Institute at the KUN and Dutch-English students, in order to explore the sharedness of lexical 'access-files' and for 'input-logogens'. In these experiments, that support an input-mechanism common to both English and Dutch, we have used cognates, words similar in form in both languages and differing in meaning (boot) or similar in meaning (hand).