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The Revised Hierarchical Model: A critical review and assessment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

JUDITH F. KROLL ,
JANET G. VAN HELL ,
NATASHA TOKOWICZ  and
DAVID W. GREEN
JUDITH F. KROLL*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Center for Language Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
JANET G. VAN HELL
Affiliation:
Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands and Department of Psychology, Center for Language Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
NATASHA TOKOWICZ
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
DAVID W. GREEN
Affiliation:
Research Department of Cognitive, Perceptual, and Brain Sciences, University College London, London, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Judith F. Kroll, Department of Psychology, 641 Moore Building, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA [email protected]
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Abstract

Brysbaert and Duyck (this issue) suggest that it is time to abandon the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994) in favor of connectionist models such as BIA+ (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002) that more accurately account for the recent evidence on non-selective access in bilingual word recognition. In this brief response, we first review the history of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM), consider the set of issues that it was proposed to address and then evaluate the evidence that supports and fails to support the initial claims of the model. Although fifteen years of new research findings require a number of revisions to the RHM, we argue that the central issues to which the model was addressed, the way in which new lexical forms are mapped to meaning and the consequence of language learning history for lexical processing, cannot be accounted for solely within models of word recognition.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 373 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

The writing of this article was supported by NIH Grant R01-HD053146 to Judith F. Kroll and by NSF grant BCS 0745372 to Natasha Tokowicz. We thank Dorothee Chwilla, Eleonora Rossi and Jorge Valdes for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Portions of the paper were presented as part of a symposium at the Seventh International Symposium on Bilingualism in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July, 2009.

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