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Mental control, language tags, and language nodes in bilingual lexical processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2003

PING LI
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia 23173, USA. E-mail: ping@cogsci.richmond.edu

Extract

In this paper Green proposes an inhibitory control (IC) model of bilingual lexical processing. At the core of Green's arguments is the notion of “mental control,” formulated in terms of inhibition, control schemas, and a supervisory attentional system. The very notion of control, it seems, suggests some sort of intentional, exogenous force at work (e.g., the supervisory attentional system). Presumably mental control differs from automatic processes (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977), yet in the IC model there is no precise computational specification of how the various parameters of the control system actually interact to determine automatic bilingual processes. In a computational view, the IC model has quite some symbolic AI flavor (e.g., with goal-oriented decision boxes and control schemas), but it also attempts to integrate activation-based accounts (e.g., interactive activation mechanisms). Again, because the model remains at a rather conceptual level as presented, it is difficult to determine how successful it will be in combining symbolic and connectionist approaches in understanding bilingual processing.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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