Towards a localist-connectionist model of word translation

Ton Dijkstra | Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

Steven Rekké | Radboud University Nijmegen

Word translation is among the most sophisticated skills that bilinguals can perform. Brysbaert and Duyck (2010) have argued that the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM; Kroll & Stewart, 1994), a verbal model for word translation in beginning and proficient bilinguals, should be abandoned in favor of connectionist models such as the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (BIA+; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). However, the partially implemented BIA+ model for bilingual word recognition has neither been applied to bilinguals of different proficiency levels nor extended to the complex process of word translation. After considering a number of aspects of the RHM, a new localist-connectionist model, called Multilink, is formulated to account for the performance of bilinguals differing in their L2 proficiency in different tasks: lexical decision, language decision, and word translation.

Keywords: bilingual, word recognition, word translation, computational models, semantic priming, cognate processing

Published online: 17 February 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.5.3.08dij

Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

Basnight-Brown, Dana M.

2014. In Foundations of Bilingual Memory, ► pp. 85 ff.

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2020. Individual differences in bilingual word recognition: The role of experiential factors and word frequency in cross-language lexical priming. Applied Psycholinguistics ► pp. 1 ff.

Ferrer-Xipell, Roser

2020. A review of the theories of lexical access and storage in bilinguals. Revista de Logopedia, Foniatría y Audiología 40:3 ► pp. 138 ff.

Jouravlev, Olessia & Debra Jared

2020. Native language processing is influenced by L2-to-L1 translation ambiguity. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35:3 ► pp. 310 ff.

Kootstra, Gerrit Jan, Ton Dijkstra & Marianne Starren

2015. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ► pp. 349 ff.

Marull, Crystal H.

2015. Syntactic position constrains cross-linguistic activation. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 5:2 ► pp. 153 ff.

Mulder, Kimberley, Ton Dijkstra, Robert Schreuder & Harald R. Baayen

2014. Effects of primary and secondary morphological family size in monolingual and bilingual word processing. Journal of Memory and Language 72 ► pp. 59 ff.

Palma, Pauline & Debra Titone

2020. In Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution, ► pp. 159 ff.

Tulkens, Stéphan, Dominiek Sandra & Walter Daelemans

2018. Metameric. The Mental Lexicon 13:3 ► pp. 333 ff.

Vanlangendonck, Flora, David Peeters, Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer & Ton Dijkstra

2020. Mixing the stimulus list in bilingual lexical decision turns cognate facilitation effects into mirrored inhibition effects. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23:4 ► pp. 836 ff.

Wen, Yun & Walter J. B. van Heuven

2017. Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words. Behavior Research Methods 49:3 ► pp. 1006 ff.

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