A Psycholinguistic Account of L1 Lexical Transfer in L2 Production

Abstract

In its development for more than five decades, numerous empirical language transfer studies have obtained many solid findings in L2 production; however, these findings often concern linguistic expressions but lack deep psycholinguistic explorations. Focusing on lexical transfer, this paper intends to provide a psycholinguistic explanation for the accumulated findings about L1 lexical transfer including conceptual, lemma and lexeme levels. This is achieved through a postulation of a psycholinguistic model of L2 production based on previous studies of bilingual representation, activation and production. Applying this model, it is suggested that the occurrence of many types of lexical transfer can be accounted for by the interaction between bilingual representation and executive control.