Bilingual Effect on Lexical Selection

With the development of society, the phenomenon of bilingual (or even multilingual) code switching is becoming more and more common, and more attention has been paid to the study of bilingualism. Then, what cognitive and psychological processes do bilinguals go through during code switching? This is a problem that must be discussed in the study of bilingual vocabulary production. Since L2 speech production research is based on L1 cognitive and psycholinguistic research (Kormos, 2006), bilingual vocabulary production research needs to start with monolingual vocabulary production research. However, compared with the monolingual lexical production model or process, the bilingual lexical production model or process is still in its infancy. Therefore, a theoretical study of it will help bilinguals better understand the cognitive process and psychology of L1 or L2 in language acquisition, so as to acquire L1 or L2 effectively. This paper discusses the theories and hypotheses related to the lexical selection, the factors affecting the lexical selection for the bilinguals. Literature review method was used in this research. Based on the reading and analysis, there are two typical hypotheses of bilingual lexical selection, which are competition and exclusion hypothesis. It is also fund that the language proficiency, language distance and preparation time will affect the lexical selection for bilingual from different aspects.