Applied Linguistics

Abstract

In this article a description is given of a model of the bilingual speaker. The model presented is based on Levelt's (1989) 'Speaking' model, which sketches a framework in which a number of (highly autonomous) information processing components are postulated. The main characteristics of the model are that it is incremental and parallel, and that lower level processing is more automatized than higher level processing. An attempt is made to adapt the Levelt model for bilingual processing. Given the firm empirical basis of the (monolingual) version of the model, it was intended to change the model as little as possible. It is concluded that the first component, the conceptualize is probably partly language-specific and partly language-independent. Further it is hypothesized that there are different formulators for each language, while there is one lexicon where lexical elements from different languages are stored together. The output of the formulators is sent to the articulator which makes use of a large set of non-language specific speech motor plans. The adapted version of Levelt's model appears to provide a good explanation of various aspects of language production, especially with respect to codeswitching and the storage and retrieval of lexical elements, and it may suggest a useful direction to take in future research on language processing in bilinguals.