... proficiency). The BIA model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 1998; van Heuven, 2000) is a bilingual extension of the monolingual Interactive Activation (IA) model for visual word recognition (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). In the IA model, there are three levels of nodes, with ascending complexity: (1) features of a letter such as curves, straight lines, or crossbars, (2) individual letters, and (3) words. Information at all levels can interact with each other during the word recognition process, which may flow both 'bottom-up' (features to letters to words) and 'top-down' (words to letters to features). Within levels, nodes compete for activation (thus inhibiting each other); across levels, nodes either inhibit or excite each other. According to IA, it is these inhibitory and excitatory connections that give rise to the appropriate activation of patterns that correspond to the perception of words. As a straightforward extension of the IA model, the BIA model ...

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