In the past decade, research on bilingual visual word recognition has given rise to a new line of study focusing on a sublexical orthographic variable referred to as orthographic markedness, derived from the comparison of the two orthotactic distributions known by a bilingual reader. Orthographic markers have been shown to speed up language decisions but also, to some extent, to modulate language nonselectivity during lexical access (i.e., the degree of co-activation of lexical representations of the two languages). In this review, we (1) describe the results available in the literature about orthographic markedness on language membership detection and lexical access and discuss the locus of these efects, which leads us to (2) present theoretical extensions to the bilingual interactive activation models and discuss their respective adequacy to the data, fnally leading us to (3) propose future research directions in the study of orthographic markedness, such as extension to diferent reading tasks and contexts as well as considering developmental and learning dynamics.