Bilingual lexical access is an area of psycholinguistics that studies the activation or retrieval process of the mental lexicon for bilingual people. Bilingual lexical access can be understood as all aspects of the word processing, including all of the mental activity from the time when a word from one language is perceived to the time when all its lexical knowledge from the target language is available. Research in this field seeks to fully understand these mental processes. Bilingual individuals have two mental lexical representations for an item or concept and can successfully select words from one language without significant interference from the other language. It is the field's goal to understand whether these dual representations interact or affect one another.