Lexical Access in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Children: A Comparative Study

The responsibility of deciding which of the activated lexical item needs to be prioritized for further processing is done by lexical selection mechanism. This uncomplicated mechanism is complicated for bilingual and multilingual populations as they face a cognitive challenge during speech processing and production. That is, the words in all the languages begin to get operative to certain extent and may compete for selection. Perhaps because of this complexity, the process involved in case of bilingual and multilingual group has not gained much attention. Hence the present study was conducted aiming to extend research in this area by examining and comparing the lexical access between monolingual, bilingual and multilingual children using picture naming reaction time experiment. 180 subjects participated in this study within the age range 8.6-9 years i.e., 60 monolinguals, 60 bilinguals and 60 multilinguals. The findings indicated faster availability of L1 in monolinguals suggesting that there is experiential difference seen between the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual children in the process of acquisition and language use and also the role of interference from the competing language in bilinguals and multilingual children.