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On keeping cool: The role of inhibition in bilingual word processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2018

MATHIEU DECLERCK*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France
GABRIELA MEADE
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders, San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA
JONATHAN GRAINGER
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France
*
Address for correspondence: Mathieu Declerck, Aix-Marseille Université, Centre St. Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, 13331 Marseille, France. mathieu.declerck@univ-amu.fr.

Extract

One of the cool aspects of the original implementation of the BIA model (van Heuven, Dijkstra & Grainger, 1998) was the discovery that inhibitory connections between language nodes and lexical representations was a necessary feature for the model to be able to simulate the target data set at that time. This demonstrates the importance of computational modeling, a key point of the present target article, since inhibitory connections were postulated to occur only between representations at the same level in the conceptual model (Grainger & Dijkstra, 1992). Top-down inhibition was subsequently dropped in the BIA+ model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), and the Multilink model of the present target article (Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte & Rekké, 2018) goes one step further by removing all kinds of inhibitory connections, both between and within levels. Instead, the authors of the model propose that bilingual language processing relies on bidirectional excitatory connections between representations at different levels. This is curious given that even more evidence has accumulated in favor of inhibition since the original implementation of the BIA model, both between neighboring lexical representations (i.e., lateral inhibition) and from language membership representations (e.g., language nodes and tags) down to lexical representations. In this commentary, we focus on whether the exclusion of these two inhibitory processes is warranted, and how the inclusion of these processes might benefit future developments of the model.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 706128. It was also supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (No. 2016196208) and Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide programs.

References

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