Written word recognition by the elementary and advanced level Persian-English bilinguals

According to a basic prediction made by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM), at early stages of language acquisition, strong L2-L1 lexical links are formed. RHM predicts that these links weaken with increasing proficiency, although they do not disappear even at higher levels of language development. To test this prediction, two groups of highly proficient and two groups of elementary L2 learners were tested on noncognate stimuli with episodic recognition tasks in both forward (L1-L2) and backward (L2-L1) directions. The pattern observed for the elementary L2 learners in both directions wasconsistent with the prediction of the RHM. The results showed the existence of strong lexical links in the backward direction at the elementary level but no such links were found in the forward direction. Contrary to the predictions of the RHM, however, L2-L1 lexical links are lost at higher levels of proficiency.