Editorial: Phonology in the Bilingual and Bidialectal Lexicon

Editorial on the Research Topic Phonology in the Bilingual and Bidialectal Lexicon One critical step when trying to comprehend a spoken message is to identify the words that the speaker intended. To recognize spoken words, listeners continuously attempt to map the incoming speech signal onto lexical representations stored in memory (McClelland and Elman, 1986; Norris, 1994): Words that partially overlap with the signal are activated until the lexical candidate that best matches the input wins over its competitors, a process known as lexical competition. Models of spoken-word recognition, most of which are based on native listener behavior, assume that lexical representations are stable, and contain at least the phonological form of words in citation. While lexical representations likely also contain other forms, for example the reduced forms found in conversational speech, it is a matter of debate whether native listeners encode spoken words exclusively as phonetically detailed exemplars (Johnson, 1997; Goldinger, 1998) or whether phonological abstraction also takes place (McQueen et al., 2006). Another assumption of models of native spoken-word recognition is that, under normal circumstances, listeners' perception of the input is optimal and faithful to the signal: Accurate lexical representations are easily contacted, and an optimal set of candidates is activated for quick lexical selection. When applied to a later-learned second language (L2), two central premises of native spoken-word recognition models are compromised: (i) the premise that listeners' perception of the incoming speech signal is optimal; and (ii) the premise that listeners' lexical representations are accurate. L2 listeners are less successful at mapping the input to lexical representations, because they tend to perceive speech through their native-language (L1) phonetic categories and phonological representations. As a result, L2 listeners activate more and/or different lexical candidates than would native listeners (Broersma and Cutler, 2011). L2 listeners' knowledge of two languages further inhibits word recognition, as words from both lexicons are activated (Marian and Spivey, 2003). L2 listeners' perceptual difficulties in turn lead to the development of inaccurate or incomplete lexical representations. The fact that L2 listeners are often exposed to the orthographic form of words before they hear these words makes it difficult to determine the content of their lexical representations. Another relevant question is the potentially asymmetrical relationship between L2 listeners' lexical representations and their production of the same words. Thus, for L2 listeners, the links between perception, lexical representations, orthography, and production are all but clear. Even for simultaneous …