FIRST LANGUAGE ACTIVATION DURING SECOND LANGUAGE LEXICAL PROCESSING An Investigation of Lexical Form, Meaning, and Grammatical Class Gretchen Sunderman The Florida State University Judith F + Kroll The Pennsylvania State University This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activa- tion model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchi- cal model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more proficient in Spanish, were compared on translation rec- ognition. In this task, participants decided whether two words, one in each language, are translation equivalents. The items in the criti- cal conditions were not translation equivalents and therefore required a “no” response, but were similar to the correct translation in either form or meaning. For example, for translation equivalents such as cara-face, critical distracters included (a) a form-related neighbor to the first word of the pair (e.g., cara-card ), (b) a form-related neigh- bor to the second word of the pair, the translation equivalent ( cara- fact ), or (c) a meaning-related word ( cara-head ). The results showed The writing of this article was supported in part by NSF Doctoral Enhancement Grant BCS-0111733 to Gretchen Sunderman and Judith F + Kroll, and by NSF grants BCS-0111734 and BCS-0418071 and NIH grant RO1MH62479 to Judith F + Kroll+ We thank Maya Misra for advice on computing measures of orthographic similarity and Rachel Varra and Asha Persaud for research assistance+ We also thank the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments+ Address correspondence to: Gretchen Sunderman, Department of Modern Languages & Linguis- tics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306; e-mail: gsunderm@fsu+edu+ SSLA, 28, 387–422+ Printed in the United States of America+ DOI: 10+10170S0272263106060177 © 2006 Cambridge University Press 0272-2631006 $12+00 387