| In most parts of the world, bilingualism (defined here as significant working knowledge of at least two languages) is and has been for a long time - the norm. A rising number of psychologists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, and educators have set out to explore issues concerning similarities and differences in the cognitive and neural systems that underlie monolingual and bilingual language use. This work was aimed to take a closer look at the nature of bilingual lexicon by investigating, with the use of Event-Related Potential (ERP) methodology, the effects of word concreteness as well as the within and cross-language effects of word repetition. The first study in this dissertation was designed to explore ERP concreteness effects in English (L1) - French (L2) bilinguals who are in the process of learning a second language. The second study examined the role of age of acquisition and language dominance in second language processing. The third study aimed to investigate unmasked cross-language repetition priming in highly proficient bilinguals whose L1 (Russian) and L2 (English) consist of different scripts. |
