The main purpose of the work described in this paper is to examine the extent to which the L2 developmental changes predicted by Kroll and Stewart's (1994) Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) can be understood by word association response behaviour. The RHM attempts to account for the relative “strength of the links between words and concepts in each of the bilingual's languages” (Kroll, Van Hell, Tokowicz & Green, 2010, p. 373). It proposes that bilinguals with higher L2 proficiency tend to rely less on mediation, while less proficient L2 learners tend to rely on mediation and access L2 words by translating from L1 equivalents. In this paper, I present findings from a simple word association task. More proficient learners provided a greater proportion of collocational links, suggesting that they mediate less when compared to less proficient learners. The results provide tentative support for Kroll and Stewart's model.

In this reply to Kroll, Van Hell, Tokowicz and Green (this issue) we present an analysis of the citations made to the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM). This gives us a quantitative summary of the current use of the RHM, showing that RHM has been used equally often to guide research in word recognition as in word production. We also question the claim that Brysbaert and Duyck's (this issue) focus on word recognition leaves RHM unscathed for the explanation of word production and the interactions between lexical and conceptual representations. For these research topics too, we feel that more progress will be made by adapting computational monolingual models to the bilingual situation rather than by trying to understand the findings from the RHM framework.