Determinants of Bilingual Lexicosemantic Organisation

Abstract This article reviews studies on the representation of words and their meanings in bilingual memory. It is argued that bilingual ‘lexicosemantic’ organisation differs between bilinguals and develops within a bilingual. Development takes place at the level of the individual words, and the memory of every individual bilingual contains structures of various types. The roles of the following variables in bilingual memory organisation are discussed: the level of proficiency in L2; the strategy of learning L2; the interval between previous and current use of L2; the L2 learning environment; various word characteristics (e.g., word concreteness and cognate status of the translation pairs).