All cases of word production are not created equal: Reply to Costa and Santesteban

While we are not necessarily in disagreement with the comment by Costa and Santesteban, neither are we as convinced as they are of the need for two modalities, one for word production, the other for word recognition. Their key claim is that “in word production, it is the speaker who intentionally chooses the target language.” Perhaps at the moment of actually switching languages, one could argue for a need for top-down intentional switching mechanism. But during most language production, simpler, automatic mechanisms of word activation – identical to those at work in word recognition – would suffice to keep the bilingual in one or the other language. Each word in a particular language whether it is spoken or heard, activates a halo of other words — virtually all of which are in the same language — and, as a result, it requires no particular intentional effort for a bilingual to remain in that language.