In two experiments, we examined whether word age-of-acquisition (AoA) is a reliable predictor of processing times in semantic tasks. In the ®rst task, participants were asked to say the ®rst associate that came to mind when they saw a stimulus word; the second task involved a semantic categorisation between words with a de®nable meaning and ®rst names. In both tasks, there were signi®cantly faster responses to earlier-acquired than to later-acquired words. On the basis of these results, we argue that age-of-acquisition eects do not originate solely from the speech output system, but from the semantic system as well. Ó

In this study, the authors show that cross-lingual phonological priming is possible not only from the 1st language (L1) to the 2nd language (L2), but also from L2 to L1. In addition, both priming effects were found to have the same magnitude and to not be related to differences in word naming latencies between L1 and L2. The findings are further evidence against language-selective access models of bilingual word processing and are more in line with strong phonological models of visual word recognition than with the traditional dual-route models.Until 1990, the general idea was that bilinguals had two mental lexicons: one for the first language and one for the second. In addition, a language switch mechanism controlled which lexicon was active. Such an architecture of language selective access seemed ideal to explain why, in general, bilinguals do not experience interference problems from one language to the other. In recent years, however, evidence has accumulated showing that the first stages of visual word recognition are largely language independent and that the assumption of independent lexicons may be incorrect. Subsequently, we give a summary of this evidence (for further discussion, see Brysbaert, 1998;Brysbaert, Van Dyck, & Van de Poel, 1999;Dijkstra, Timmermans, & Schriefers, 2000;van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998).First, in lexical decision tasks, it has been shown that bilingual participants cannot suppress one of their languages, even when the task strongly urges them to do so because of interference costs. For instance, it has been shown repeatedly that if the nonword trials contain words of the nontarget language, there are large processing costs associated with these trials (e.g., Nas, 1983). In addition, these trials have strong inhibitory effects on the processing of interlingual homographs (i.e., words that exist in both languages but have different meanings; De Groot, Delmaar, & Lupker, 2000;Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven, 1999;Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998). The magnitude of the inhibitory effect depends on the relative frequency of the homograph in the target and the nontarget language. Recently, Dijkstra et al. (2000) reported that the frequency-dependent interference effect not only appears in a lexical decision task (e.g., for a Dutch-English bilingual, Is this a Dutch word or not?), but also in a go/no-go paradigm (e.g., Press on the key when the stimulus is a Dutch word only), despite that in the latter paradigm, there is little discussion that performance would be best if the nontarget language system were simply suppressed.Second, researchers have extended basic findings of monolingual language processing to bilingual processing. Bijeljac-Babic, Biardeau, and Grainger (1997), for instance, looked at the inhibition effect of orthographic neighbors. Previous research (e.g., Segui & Grainger, 1990) had shown that low-frequency target words are more difficult to recognize if, immediately before, a high-frequency orthographic neighbor has been presented tachistoscopica...

It has been claimed that the frequency eOE ect in visual word naming is an artefact of age-of-acquisition: Words are named faster not because they are encountered more often in texts, but because they have been acquired earlier. In a series of experiments using immediate naming, lexical decision, and masked priming, we found that frequency had a clear eOE ect in lexical tasks when age-of-acquisition is controlled for. At the same time, age-ofacquisition was a signi® cant variable in all tasks, whereas imageability had no eOE ect. These results corroborate ® ndings previously reported in English and Dutch.

It is not easy to comment on Dijkstra and Van Heuven's model because there are many more aspects we agree with than aspects we feel uncomfortable about. Indeed, the BIA model has played an enormous role in showing us how bilingual visual word recognition can be achieved without recurrence to the intuitively appealing – but wrong – ideas of separate, language-specific lexicons and language-selective access. As in many other research areas, a working computational model has been much more influential in convincing critical readers (and researchers) than any series of empirical findings. The BIA+ model inherits this strength and, hopefully, in the coming years will be implemented in enough detail to exceed its predecessor. In the rest of this comment, we would like to put a cautionary note behind the temporal delay assumption introduced in the target article and provide some additional corroborating evidence for the lack of non-linguistic effects on early processes in the identification system.

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