What do foreign neighbors say about the mental lexicon?

A corpus analysis of phonological word-forms shows that English words have few phonological neighbors that are Spanish words. Concomitantly, Spanish words have few phonological neighbors that are English words. These observations appear to undermine certain accounts of bilingual language processing, and have significant implications for the processing and representation of word-forms in bilinguals.This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Kansas through the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders R01 DC 006472