Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition / Volume 15 / Special Issue 01 / January 2012, pp 167-172
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011. The online version of this article is published within an Open Access environment subject to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/>. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use.
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728911000149 (About DOI), Published online: 07 April 2011
- OPEN ACCESS
Research Notes
What do foreign neighbors say about the mental lexicon?*
MICHAEL S. VITEVITCHa1 c1
a1 Department of Psychology, University of Kansas
Abstract
A corpus analysis of phonological word-forms shows that English words have few phonological neighbors that are Spanish words. Concomitantly, Spanish words have few phonological neighbors that are English words. These observations appear to undermine certain accounts of bilingual language processing, and have significant implications for the processing and representation of word-forms in bilinguals.
(Received August 17 2010)
(Revised February 25 2011)
(Accepted March 03 2011)
(Online publication April 07 2011)
Keywords:
Correspondence:
c1 Address for correspondence: Michael S. Vitevitch, Spoken Language Laboratory, Department of Psychology, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA mvitevit@ku.edu
Footnotes
* This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Kansas through the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders R01 DC 006472. I would like to thank Melissa Stamer for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, and Holger Mitterer for suggesting the analysis that took vowel assimilation into account.
