Cue Saliency Effects in Second Language Lexical Acquisition and Processing

The present study serves to demonstrate that learning new L2 vocabulary items in association with unique cues can have a rather dramatic effect on the way in which the newly learned items are processed. In the present study, participants learned new L2 vocabulary items in association with either familiar line drawings or uniquely colored pictures. It was found that new L2 words learned in association with the uniquely colored pictures were produced faster in a picture-naming task and that they were translated in a completely symmetrical fashion. L2 words learned in association with familiar line drawings, on the other hand, were translated in an asymmetrical fashion, such that they were produced much faster when the L1 was the language of production and more slowly when the L2 was the language of production. A model of bilingual lexical acquisition and processing (BILAPRO) was proposed to account for these findings in particular, as well as many of the major findings reported in the bilingual lexical processing literature.