Abstract

The main focus of this paper is to determine whether bilinguals selectively activate lexical representations in the target language, that is the language they are currently using, or they nonselectively access lexical representations in both languages, as well as to point out the factors influencing processing asymmetry. In the first part of the paper the organization of bilingual mental lexicon is discussed, while the other part of the paper is focused on the analysis and comparison of several experiments addressing the question of lexical processing asymmetry. On the basis of the obtained results , I will draw the conclusions concerning factors which might influence processing asymmetry and try to find evidence favoring one of the two proposed accesses