The linguistic role of the right hemisphere in bilingual language processing was examined. Ten right-handed Spanish-English bilinguals were tachistoscopically presented with mixed lists of Spanish and English words to either the right or left visual field and asked to identify the language and the word presented. Five of the subjects identified English as their first language and five, Spanish. Their median age was 22. Language recognition scores, corrected for guessing, were superior to word recognition only for right hemisphere trials. While word recognition did not depend on visual field of presentation or language of presentation, language recognition varied both with visual field and with language. Spanish words were better recognized than English words in right hemisphere presentations for the language recognition task; for the word recognition task, English words were identified more successfully than Spanish words for left hemisphere presentations. It is concluded that the right hemisphere superiority is based on a specific left hemisphere deficit in recognizing the second language and a general right hemisphere superiority for recognition of Spanish. (Author/RW)