Bilingual semantic memory

the organization of words various information about words is presumably more complex in a bilingual’s that a monolingual’s memory, because words have to be organized not only by meaning but also by language.

words from two languages might be stored

1.      in common in one conceptual form , according to a common- store hypothesis,

2.      stored life , a bilingual translate from one language, according to a separate- store hypothesis.

a bilingual can function independently in one of her two languages with minimum interference from the other language , thus supporting the separete –store hypothesis.

One common store for two language

the common-store hypothesis is supported if a task can be ferformend equally well unilingually or bilingually. tasks that emphasize processing, of word for their meaning rather that for their forms seem to obtain results that support this hyppthesis. according to McCormack (1977), information is stored as a complex of attributes in a single store, with language representing one of these attributes.

Separate stores for two Languages

the separate store hypothesis may be supported if a bilingual’s performance an a task suffers  when done bilingually compared to unilingually. tasks that tap the forms of words or associative links between words seem to favor this hypothesis. associative links can be formed solely by contiguity of occurrences of two objects or events without a close semantic relation, as between  soft and pillow. associative links appear to be stronger between words from the same language that between words from different language.

Types of words in interlingual semantic memory

most studies on bilingual semantic memory use as stimuli words that are frequnt , concrete, and picturable and have clear translation equivalents between the two language studied.

researchers varied type of words : cognare versus noncognates, concrete versus abstract words, culturally similar versus distnct words.