In the present study, we examined bilingual memory organization, using the priming paradigm. Many of the previous studies in which this experimental technique has been used in the bilingual domain appear to have had several differences in methodology that have caused there to be a lot of variation in the data reported. The aim of the present work was to create an experimental situation that was well constrained so that automatic processes could be observed. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals participated in an unmasked semantic- and translation-priming study in which a lexical decision task was used. The results revealed significant translation-priming effects in both language directions and, unexpectedly, significant semantic priming in the L2-L1 direction only. In Experiment 2, we examined semantic- and translation-priming effects with a forward mask design. The results indicated that significant priming was obtained only for translation word pairs in both language directions. These results are discussed with regard to current models of bilingual memory representation.

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The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed-BILL) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell-FALL; taught-TEACH). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable REGULAR and IRREGULAR LENGTH PRESERVED facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers' latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.The major verbal inflectional affixes in English are -S, -ED, -ING. In addition, however, there are many irregularly inflected past tense forms (FELL, TAUGHT). There is considerable debate about whether native speakers understand and produce regular and irregular inflected verb forms in the same way. Less frequently investigated is how non-native speakers process the regular and irregular inflectional morphology of their second language (L2). The present study compares how native and non-native speakers of English recognize English verb forms. Non-native