Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T19:19:36.619Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The bilingual mental lexicon beyond Dutch–English written words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

MIRA GORAL*
Affiliation:
City University of New York
*
Address for correspondence: Mira Goral, Lehman College, CUNY, Speech building, Rm. 219, 250 Bedford Park Blvd., Bronx, NY 10468, USAmira.goral@lehman.cuny.edu

Extract

The contribution that Ton Dijkstra has made to the field of bilingualism, with his colleagues over the years, is beyond measure. He has advanced our field with the thoughtful and thought-provoking models of the bilingual lexicon he has put forward, and with the vast empirical data he and his colleagues have collected from numerous bilinguals, using a variety of experimental methods. This paper by Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte, and Rekké (2018) is no exception. It comprises a thoughtful and detailed description of a new model, Multilink, and provides relevant information regarding the context in which the model was developed, its assumptions, its successes and challenges. The model is the first to consider aspects of both word production and word recognition, as well as of word translation, and to explicitly address how translation equivalents that share both form and meaning – cognates – may be processed. Also addressed are word-frequency concerns, including differences in word frequency that are dependent on language proficiency and exposure. The assumptions that are made within the model are clearly laid out, and less-than-ideal decisions that needed to be made are acknowledged. The authors conclude that a model like Multilink could be the basis for a general model of the mental lexicon. In that, they promote the view taken in Libben, Goral, and Libben (2017) that the bilingual – not the monolingual – lexicon should be considered as the default.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*The author thanks Gary Libben and Maya Libben for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

Dijkstra, A., Wahl, A., Buytenhuijs, F., van Halem, N., Al-jibouri, Z., de Korte, M., & Rekké, S. (2018). Multilink: a computational model for bilingual word recognition and word translation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, doi:10.1017/S1366728918000287.Google Scholar
Grosjean, F. (1998). Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 131149.Google Scholar
Libben, M. (2017). Non-selective language activation and bilingualism as the default mental lexicon. In: Libben, M., Goral, M., and Libben, G. (Eds.). Bilingualism: A framework for Understanding the Mental Lexicon (pp 103122). John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Libben, M., Goral, M., & Libben, G. (Eds.) (2017). Bilingualism: A framework for Understanding the Mental Lexicon. John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Thierry, G., & Wu, Y. J. (2007). Brain potentials reveal unconscious translation during foreign language comprehension. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, 104, 1253012535.Google Scholar