Abstract
The article examines how the mental lexicon is formed and transformed in bilingual settings, focusing on the semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive mechanisms that mediate the interaction between two linguistic systems. The relevance of the study stems from the need to understand how lexical items are organized in the minds of bilingual speakers, which types of semantic relations become dominant, and how mechanisms of competition and mutual facilitation operate between the two languages in today’s bilingual environment. The article analyzes the major factors influencing the structure of the bilingual mental lexicon linguistic environment, dominant language, duration of language experience, frequency of use, and socio-cognitive conditions. It further describes the activation speed of lexical elements in each language and their redistribution within semantic networks. Additionally, associative experiments, word-recognition latency measurements, and semantic-field mapping techniques are discussed as effective tools for uncovering the internal lexical organization of bilingual individuals. The analysis shows that semantic links between lexical units in both languages may reinforce one another or, conversely, lead to interference affecting lexical choice, semantic activation rates, and communicative decision-making. The findings underscore the importance of investigating the mental lexicon in bilingual contexts for language-teaching methodology, cognitive diagnostics, prediction of bilingual speech strategies, and the optimization of cross-linguistic interaction.