Abstract :
Brysbaert and Duyck (this issue) suggest that it is time to abandon the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994)
in favor of connectionist models such as BIA+ (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002) that more accurately account for the recent
evidence on non-selective access in bilingual word recognition. In this brief response, we first review the history of the
Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM), consider the set of issues that it was proposed to address and then evaluate the evidence
that supports and fails to support the initial claims of the model. Although fifteen years of new research findings require a
number of revisions to the RHM, we argue that the central issues to which the model was addressed, the way in which new
lexical forms are mapped to meaning and the consequence of language learning history for lexical processing, cannot be
accounted for solely within models of word recognition.
