ABSTRACT

In the present study I examine the problem of memory representation in the case of bilinguals. The questions put are: în what language does the bilingual think? Does the ability to speak and understand two languages mean that one has two or more ways of remembering, knowing, and thinking? Or are these language systems functionally connected to a common cognitive or conceptual system? The results of the experiment in which the subjects had to perform a categorization task show that the bilingual's two languages are conceptuali}' mediated by a common semantic representation. Of course, there are certain differences in the conceptual representation of the bilinguals at different stages of learning a second language.

KEYWORDS: psycholinguistics, bilinguals, memory stores, categorization