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Computational modeling of bilingualism: How can models tell us more about the bilingual mind?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2013

PING LI*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology and Center for Brain, Behavior, and Cognition, University Park, PA 16802, USA[email protected]

Extract

Models are no new beasts to scholars of bilingualism. During the last several decades we have seen many interesting and important models that postulate how the bilingual mind works. But specific, computationally implemented, models are far less common than general, verbal, models of bilingualism. This is because the former require efforts on the part of the researcher to conduct algorithmic and representational implementations, whereas the latter do not. The central question is: What good does implementation do in telling us about the bilingual mind beyond what the verbal models do? This Special Issue is an attempt to address this question with seven computational models of bilingualism from different research labs.

Type
Introduction
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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Footnotes

*

Preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the US National Science Foundation (BCS-1057855). I would like to thank Viorica Marian and other colleagues for organizing and participating in the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Bilingualism: Integrating Acquisition and Processing at the 8th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB8). Several papers in this Special Issue are based on presentations made at the workshop, including Shook and Marian, Zevin and Yang, and Zhao and Li.

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