It is a commonplace that the major theoretical issue in the domain of language acquisition is the question of whether or not language development is independent of other aspects of cognitive develop-ment. The issue of the separateness or otherwise of the 1anguage faculty" or "Ianguage module" also arises in respect of language processing, and in this co nnection different interpretations of cer-tain lexical phenomena have figured prominently in the debate. This in itself seems a good reason to consider the arguments for and against modular processing in any treatment of the mental lexicon. How-ever, it is not the only reason.
Neglected though it has been in some recent publications on the mental lexicon (e.g. Aitchison 1994; Schmitt and McCarthy 1997; Schreuder and Weltens 1993), the modularity debate goes to the very heart of the large questions that researchers working on lexical issues face constantly, whatever their particular interests - questions about the distinguishability of "linguistic knowledge" from "pragmatic" or "encyclopedic" knowledge and about how and where to situate different aspects of lexical knowledge in relation to any putative lin-guistic "core". Obviously, these questions are every bit as relevant to second language lexical research as to first language lexical research. In the case of the former there is the added complication that some theoreticians have wished to make a qualitative distinction between knowledge of second language acquired beyond the childhood years and/or in a formal instructional setting and linguistic competence proper stored in the language module.
This paper begins with a historical contextualization of the modular view of the mind and a general discussion of language processing from a modular perspective. It then considers and critiques some arguments in favour of modularity based on neurolinguistic data, before examining the case for and against the notion that the formal aspects of lexical processing are informationally encapsulated. Finally, it discusses the relevance of the modularity concept to lexical processing.

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