This chapter introduces chief postulates common to usage-based (UB) approaches to language. The UB approach maintains that speakers’ experiences with language shape how language is stored. Experiences with specific words and word combinations in particular linguistic, discursive, and social contexts accrue in memory and subsequently contribute to patterns of variability evident in speech productions. Usage-based approaches regularly consider independent effects on lexical representations of decontextualized prior probabilities (e.g. phone/word/bigram frequencies, type frequencies), and, increasingly, contextually informed counts (e.g. lexical items’ cumulative exposure to conditioning effects of the production contexts, phone/word probabilities) are considered. This chapter offers an overview of studies exploring the connection between usage patterns and bilingual sound systems as well as studies exploring evidence of interlingual influence arising from bilingual lexical storage (schematic ties in memory). The chapter suggests potential avenues for future UB research into bilingual phonetics and phonology.

Because the majority of the world’s population speaks more than one language, in this chapter we consider that a “bilingual mental lexicon” can be viewed as the default, which may be a more accurate way of exploring lexical and conceptual memory. We transition to examine how concepts and words are represented in the mind, with a particular emphasis on the dynamic, developmental nature of word-to-concept mapping and the distributed, overlapping characteristics of semantic representations. Against this background, we review several theoretical models of word processing – including word recognition, production, and translation. The first set of models includes the Word Association Model and the Concept Mediation Model. We then discuss another set of models that offer a more detailed account of the conceptual system by emphasizing the degree of overlap that exists between conceptual representations in the two languages. In the last section of the chapter, we review two localist-connectionist models: the BIA/BIA+/BIA-d and the Multilink Models.