This volume is a response both to the increasing interest in multilingual phenomena and lexical issues in language learning. It is of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in bi- and multilingualism, second and multiple language acquisition, language processing and language learning, mental lexicon, applied linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics and language teaching.
Recent research on third language acquisition and trilingualism has made clear that most multilingual studies actually deal with vocabulary learning or the lexicon. So far books on the mental lexicon have mainly been concerned with two languages in contact. This book is unique because it explores the multilingual lexicon by providing insights from research studies conducted in psycholinguistics, applied linguistics and neurolinguistics. It goes beyond the use of two languages and thus concentrates on a new and developing area in linguistic research. The different perspectives included in this volume provide a link to the mainstream work on the lexicon and vocabulary acquisition and will stimulate further debate in these areas and in the study of multilingualism.
Why Investigate the Multilingual Lexicon?.- Lexical Processing in Bilinguals and Multilinguals: The Word Selection Problem.- The Transfer-Appropriate-Processing Approach and the Trilingual's Organisation of the Lexicon.- The Nature of Cross-Linguistic Interaction in the Multilingual System.- Activation of Lemmas in the Multilingual Mental Lexicon and Transfer in Third Language Learning.- Parasitism as a Default Mechanism in L3 Vocabulary Acquisition.- Investigating the Role of Prior Foreign Language Knowledge: Translating from an Unknown into a Known Foreign Language.- The Role of Typology in the Organization of the Multilingual Lexicon.- A Strategy Model of Multilingual Learning.- Formulaic Utterances in the Multilingual Context.- Lexicon in the Brain: What Neurobiology Has to Say about Languages.- Perspectives on the Multilingual Lexicon: A Critical Synthesis.
