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In this paper we review recent research on experimental psycholinguistic approaches to the bilingual lexicon. The focus in this work is to understand how it is that lexical access in both comprehension and production is fundamentally nonselective with respective to language, yet bilinguals are able to control the use of their two languages with relatively high accuracy. We first illustrate the nature of the data that support the claims of nonselectivity and then consider some of the factors that may modulate the resulting cross-language competition. These include differences in lexical parsing strategies across languages, in lexical cues that signal one language rather than another, in the ability to allocate cognitive resources, and in the nature of the tasks that initiate spoken production. We argue that the competitive nature of processing across the two languages of the bilingual provides an exquisite model to examine cognitive activity and its control.
