The architecture of the mental lexicon and the selection of lexical nodes

Abstract

This study presents the architecture of the mental lexicon of third language learners by focusing on three representation levels: letter, word and language. In particular, this analysis attempts to examine the extent of the influence of the first and second languages known by bilingual learners of English. The study is guided by Dijkstra’s (2003) Multilingual Interactive Activation (MIA) model, and the hypothesis of the language selective or language nonselective access of third language learners is tested. The method involved in this analysis is the word translation task as a tool for investigating the organization of the mental lexicon. The results obtained as a result of the translation task claim that trilingual speakers can operate with three languages during the process of learning.Keywords: multilingual processing, mental lexicon, language typology.