The second language lexicon: some evidence from university-level learners of French and German

A widely held view among psycholinguists is that the L 2 mental lexicon is qualitatively different from the L, mental lexicon - more 'phonological' and more 'loosely organized'. In this paper we present some C-test-elicited data from the pilot phase of the Trinity College Dublin Modern Languages Project which call the above view into question. Our data suggest that the way in which words are processed depends not on the status (L 1 or L 2 ) of the language of which they are tokens, but rather on the degree of difficulty of the lexical task concerned. Our data further suggest that there is some measure of interaction between L, and L 2 lexical processing.