The Role of Typology in the Organization of the Multilingual Lexicon

The study of the multilingual lexicon has been approached from different perspectives including theoretical proposals and empirical studies of speech production and speech perception. In the case of speech production, most research studies have focused on cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of third or additional languages (see Cenoz, Hufeisen & Jessner, 2001a and b). This chapter reports a research study on cross-linguistic influence and examines the effect of language typology on the activation of languages in the multilingual lexicon.