The competitive nature of the lexical selection process during spoken word production is well established in monolinguals. In this paper we explore the implication of this process for spoken word production in bilinguals. A cross-language semantic competitor priming effect was demonstrated, which shows that cross-language lexical competition is a feature of the word production system of the unbalanced English–French bilinguals who participated in the experiment. Experimental evidence was also found which suggests that a selected language bias effected through inhibition of the unwanted language plays an important role in resolving the cross-language lexical competition during bilingual word production in a selected language. The data further suggest that the dominance of the unwanted language relative to the selected language determines the presence/absence or “strength” of inhibition through which the selected language bias is effected. These findings are also interpreted in terms of a recent language-specific lexical selection account of bilingual lexical access.

The gap/gapless processing debate in the psycholinguistics literature contrasts two processing models: one that assumes the trace-based Government and Binding (or Principles and Parameters) Grammar and the (augmented) Active Filler Strategy and one that assumes the traceless Dependency Categorial Grammar and the Principle of Dependency Formation. This paper reports on an experiment that found new evidence against the gapless/traceless model, considers why such evidence was not found in previous studies, and explores whether a parser that combines a (partially) traceless grammar and the augmented Active Filler Strategy can explain the current finding.

Byshowing that short-term sentence recall can be significantly affected by words encountered in an intervening distractor task, Potter and Lombardi (1990, Journal ofMemory and Language, 29, 633-654) argue that short-term sentence recall is often verbatim because of the availability of recently activated lexical entries during the regeneration of the sentence from its conceptual representation. We show that similar effects can be obtained even when bilinguals perform an intervening task in a different language from that of sentence recall, or when monolinguals perform an intervening task upon pictures. Furthermore, we show that the presentation of a word in P&L's distractor task does not, in any case, affect subsequent retrieval of a semantically related word as measured in a picture-naming task. We suggest that the effects on recall reported here and by P&Lshould be explained in terms of conceptual level interference at the time of recall. Wealso discuss the implications of our suggestion for the issue of the verbatimness of short-term sentence recall.Short-term sentence recall is traditionally regarded as involving a process of"reading off" the short-lasting representation(s) of the surface form of information ofa sentence-for example, the phonological, orthographic, auditory, or articulatory representations (see, e.g., Glanzer, Fischer, & Dorfman, 1984). Potter and Lombardi (1990; hereafter P&L) mount a challenge to this view and argue instead that like long-term sentence recall, short-term sentence recall involves a process of regenerating a sentence from its conceptual representation using the normal mechanisms of sentence production. They hypothesize that the accuracy and verbatimness ofshort-term recall compared with long-term recall is due to the fact that in the former case the regenerative process is aided by the added availability ofa set of unordered recently activated lexical entries in the mental lexicon (we shall refer to this as the lexical priming account). In the present article, we do not contest P&Vs view that short-term sentence recall involves a process of regeneration from the conceptual level (although we suspect that regeneration is probably not the The work reported on in this article was conducted while the first author was in receipt of an Overseas Research Student Award from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, a bursary from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, and a sponsorship from the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. We thank Stephen Monsell and Linda Wheeldon for supplying the computerized pictures used in Experiments 2 and 3 and the similarity ratings used in Experiment 3. We are also grateful to Mary C. Potter and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. Correspondence should be sent to 1. N. Williams, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Keynes House, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lQA, England (e-mail: jnwI2@cus.cam....