The Impact of Age of Acquisition on the speed of Lexical retrieval in Bilinguals

Abstract

The current study assessed the performance of 100 (Arabic-English) early and late bilinguals who lived in Kuwait and were exposed to English as a second language. These students are all students at a technical college in Kuwait who are in their second year of study. They are majoring in scientific fields as many of them are employees enrolled to pursue their education. We used free naming and translation tasks to investigate bilinguals' lexical activation and the effect of age of acquisition on lexical semantic processing. The current study's main goal was to distinguish the lexical semantic organization of early and late bilinguals and to see if there was a difference in the performance of both types of bilinguals in both tasks. It investigated whether the age of acquisition effect emerged during the subjects' lexical activation process. According to the findings, early bilinguals had a faster reaction time and a higher rate of accuracy than late bilinguals.