Bilingual Memory and Hierarchical Models

tain associations pertaining to rela tionships or emotions involving objects, things, or persons, espe cially for a monolingual speaker of English. Now, consider this same concept in a bilingual setting. Does the concept of love carry infor mation regarding its translation equivalent of amor (e.g., the fact that in Spanish this concept is used primarily to show emotions to per sons, but not to animals or objects)? Early researchers addressed this question at a general level by pos ing 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). Re cent research, however, has ad dressed this classic question by fo cusing more closely on how the bilingual's two languages are re lated in real time and what mecha nisms and processes are involved during word retrieval and lan guage processing. The purpose of this review is to consider some issues regarding how bilinguals organize their two languages in memory. My aim in this discussion is not to be exhaus tive; rather, the discussion is selec tive. I start by providing a brief discussion of current models of bi