There are three major reasons why this article can be considered original: 1) it provides a unified model for grasping bilingual language processing that is not focused on a single factor or a single linguistic level, as has most often been the case in the past; 2) it brings together the study of bilingualism from both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives and in a unifying fashion, which is rare in the literature; and 3) it creates a platform for testing numerous predictions that are not dependent on any one theory.