Language membership as a gradient emergent feature

Extract

In their keynote article, Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte, and Rekké (2018) introduce the Multilink model representing an integrated bi/multilingual lexicon. This proposal builds upon both previous and recent research on an integrated cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty (for a summary, see e.g., Putnam, Carlson & Reitter, 2018). In our view, the adjustments proposed by the authors are an improvement on previous instantiations of similar models such as those discussed in the present article. In our remarks we explicate how the Multilink model may be further enhanced, by making any appeal to language-specific nodes or representations epiphenomenal. To achieve this, we propose a novel approach to representing language membership as the result of gradient emergent principles that builds upon the integrated lexicon underlying the Multilink model.