The Bilingual Mental Lexicon in L2 Sentence Processing

Abstract

This paper explores the consequences of the language-integrated nature of the bilingual mental lexicon for L2 sentence processing. It reviews L2 processing studies on gender agreement and syntactic structure building that test whether delays and cross-linguistic influence in lexical processing of the L2 lead to differences between L2 and L1 sentence processing. Slower L2 lexical processing delays and attenuates effects of syntactic structure in L2 sentence processing. In addition, cross-linguistic lexical influence can engender non-target patterns in L2 compared to L1 sentence processing. The paper spells out the assumptions and predictions of the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, and I discuss how its insights can be incorporated into current models of L2 sentence processing.