Maud Jacquet

Understanding bilingual memory: models and data

Bilingual memory research in the past decade and, particularly, in the past five years, has developed a range of sophisticated experimental, neuropsychological and computational techniques that have allowed researchers to begin to answer some of the major long-standing questions of the field. We explore bilingual memory along the lines of the conceptual division of language knowledge and organization, on the one hand, and the mechanisms that operate on that knowledge and organization, on the other. Various interactive-activation and connectionist models of bilingual memory that attempt to incorporate both organizational and operational considerations will serve to bridge these two divisions. Much progress has been made in recent years in bilingual memory research, which also serves to illuminate general (language-independent) memory processes.

The BIA++: Extending the BIA+ to a dynamical distributed connectionist framework

Dijkstra and van Heuven have made an admirable attempt to develop a new model of bilingual memory, the BIA+. Their article presents a clear and well-reasoned theoretical justification of their model, followed by a description of their model. The BIA+ is, as the name implies, an extension of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra & Grainger, 1998; etc), which was itself an adaptation to bilingual memory of McClelland & Rumelhart’s (1981) Interactive Activation model of monolingual memory. The authors provide a wealth of background on bilingual memory cross-lingual interference and priming effects in what amounts to a veritable review of the literature in this area. The model that they propose is designed to account for many of these empirically observed effects. In what follows we will center our discussion around three points related to the design of their model. These issues are: • the use of modular vs. distributed representations; • learning; • emergence and self-organization of lexical items. We will discuss each of these points in turn. Overview

All cases of word production are not created equal: Reply to Costa and Santesteban

Although we are not necessarily in disagreement with the comment by Costa and Santesteban [1xBilingual word perception and production: two sides of the same coin?. Costa, A and Santesteban, M. Trends Cogn. Sci. 2004; 8: 253Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (19)See all References][1], neither are we as convinced as they are of the need for two modalities, one for word production, the other for word recognition. Their key claim is that ‘in word production, it is the speaker who intentionally chooses the target language’. Perhaps at the moment of actually switching languages, one could argue for a need for a top-down intentional switching mechanism. But during most language production, simpler, automatic mechanisms of word activation – identical to those at work in word recognition – would suffice to keep the bilingual speaker in one or the other language. Each word in a particular language whether it is spoken or heard, activates a halo of other words – virtually all of which are in the same language – and, as a result, it requires no particular intentional effort for a bilingual to remain in that language. If you are having a financial discussion, it requires no intentional effort to remain in a financial context, as opposed to say, a culinary context. The same applies, we believe, for languages. It strikes us that the underlying mechanism of spreading activation suffices to explain (virtually) all of both word production as well as word recognition.Further, throughout our article we emphasize the importance of the role of the task. In a task requiring you to switch languages at the end of each sentence, there would, indeed, be a great deal of intentional effort involved in doing so and, in this case, Costa and Santestebans point would certainly be correct. On the other hand, if you ask people to produce, as quickly as possible, the first word that comes to mind when they hear the utterance, ‘What do cows drink?’ they will produce ‘milk’, independently of any intentional desire to do so. This could reasonably be called non-intentional (bottom-up) word production.Our point is that, although we are certainly not opposed to different mechanisms or combinations of processes for word production and word recognition, the case for this has to be made empirically. It is not enough simply to state the necessity of intentionality in specific-language word production and then conclude that this implies the existence of separate word production and word recognition mechanisms (i.e. different combinations of processes occurring in word perception compared with word production). In short, all cases of word production are not created equal.