De Organisatie Van Het Tweetalige Lexicon.

In this article a description is given of a series of experiments in which it was tried to discover to what extend lexical items from two languages are stored separately or jointly. The experimental tasks used were lexical decision tasks with repetition and priming. Four different types of words were used that varied with respect to similarity in form and meaning in the two languages Dutch and English. Subjects were Dutch university students and members of staff from the English department. It was shown that words that are similar in the two langauges with respect to both form and meaning have a single representation in the lexicon, while words that were similar in form but different in meaning have separate representations for the two languages. For the nearly balanced bilinguals (members of staff) it was found that even for the real cognates (form and meaning similarity) the lexical elements have language separate representations. Apparently, the lexical organisation is different for advanced and very advanced speakers of a foreign language