Bilingual memory research: From storage to processing issues

A review is offered of various bilingual memory studies that have been carried out during the past quarter century. The vast majority of these studies have employed lexical items as the investigative tool, tested outside of a grammatical or semantic context. Some of the major limitations of such lexical studies are discussed. A number of arguments are provided to support the trend in recent studies to examine bilingual memory within the framework of contextualized language units. In contrast to the earlier lexical studies, which largely focused on storage issues, the more recent studies tend to examine issues concerned with lexical access and processing of the bilingual's two linguistic codes. It is argued that studies employing contextualized linguistic units are more reflective of natural language processing.