Marcus Taft is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, where has been located for more than 40 years. He is the author of well over 100 publications, including the book Reading and the Mental Lexicon. His research looks at the cognitive mechanisms involved in adult word comprehension, primarily lexical processes in reading, with the over-arching theme being the question of how readers make use of the internal structure of words in order to recognise them. How is the orthographic structure of a word represented in the "mental lexicon" and what are the optimal decoding strategies for reading words written in the particular orthography of one's language? In addition to his research on the English language, Marcus has published papers about lexical processing in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French. In more recent years, he has been actively involved in research into bilingual processing, which is the topic of the current presentation.
