Written word recognition by the elementary and advanced level Persian-English bilinguals

According  to  a  basic  prediction  made  by  the  Revised  Hierarchical  Model  (RHM),  at  early  stages  of language  acquisition,  strong  L2-L1  lexical  links  are  formed.  RHM  predicts  that  these  links  weaken with  increasing  proficiency,  although  they  do  not  disappear  even  at  higher  levels  of  language development. To test this prediction, two groups of highly proficient and two groups of elementary L2 learners were tested on noncognate stimuli with episodic recognition tasks in both forward (L1-L2) and backward  (L2-L1)  directions.  The  pattern  observed  for  the  elementary  L2  learners  in  both  directions wasconsistent  with  the  prediction  of  the  RHM.  The  results  showed  the existence of  strong  lexical  links  in  the  backward  direction  at  the  elementary  level  but no such links  were  found in the forward direction. Contrary to the predictions of the RHM, however, L2-L1 lexical links are lost at higher levels of proficiency.