The role of extralinguistic information in building up the bilingual mental lexicon

Abstract

In the modern world enhancing language contacts dictate the necessity of the use of the English language as a means of communication. Unfortunately, not always can a bilingual listener master L2 at a level, when communication is carried out without perception and comprehension difficulties due to prosodic and inherent linguistic discrepancies of the languages in contact. Presently, the question about whether a non-native listener uses a single vocabulary choosing from it contextually determined lexical units and arranging them according to the principles of bilingual interactive models , or separate vocabulary storages, is not fully solved. The strategies of a foreign text perception and comprehension are greatly determined by the type of context and extralinguistic information, i.e. the communicative environment. Thus, the bilingual mental lexicon is shaped by the interaction of prosodic, linguistic and extralinguistic information. Key words: language contacts, bilingualism, strategies of perception, extralinguistic information, mental lexicon.