Does bilingualism alter lexical structure? Response to Oppenheim, Wu, and Thierry (2018)

An influential claim in recent work on bilingualism is that bilinguals reading words entirely in their non‐native language (L2) activate their native language (L1) translations (Thierry & Wu, 2007). In Costa et al. (2017), we argued that the experimental results used to support such a claim do not require translation, and that the effects reported by Thierry and Wu (2007) could be due to activation within L2. Oppenheim et al. (2018) responded to both our theoretical account and our implementation. Here, we discuss some of the issues raised in that response, and we focus on the main theoretical thesis developed in our original article, namely that the crosstalk between two languages may affect the way the lexica are structured.