فاطمه نعمتی

Previous studies demonstrate a controversy over lexical selection in bilinguals with two broad language-specific and language-universal approaches to address the issue. To contribute to the bulk of related enquiries, this study investigated if having two lexical items causes any competition and whether this competition causes any delay in lexical selection time. To that aim, two groups of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL) were recruited from an English language institute. The experimental group had English equivalents for the lexical items of the picture-naming task; the control group had no English equivalents for these lexical items. The picture-naming task was designed using Open Sesame software. An independent sample t-test with p-value set at 0.05 was used to compare the naming latencies of the experimental and control group participants. Although the difference in lexical selection time did not reach statistical significance, the results indicate the existence of a competition in the lexical selection process. This study has gone some way towards enhancing our understanding about language universal lexical selection in bilinguals by showing that having more than one lexical item for one concept causes competition and exposure to such stimuli activates all the available lexical items from an individual’s linguistic repertoire.