RUI: Computational Developmental Bilingualism: A Self-Organizing Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition

University Of Richmond, Richmond VA

Investigators

Abstract

The ability of children to acquire their native vocabulary with such ease is truly remarkable, and one that we are only beginning to understand scientifically. In this light it is even more remarkable how easily children raised in bilingual environments can learn two different vocabularies. How are their language systems developed and organized to cope with two different sets of mental dictionaries? Cognitive scientists have addressed this question by studying the language behaviors of bilinguals through their course of development and into adulthood, and in their social and cultural contexts. They have even begun to examine the neural bases of bilingualism, but one approach that has not received much attention is the use of computational models. Meteorologists, for instance, use computational models of weather systems like hurricanes and tornadoes, not just to predict their occurrence, but to more basically understand their dynamics and underlying mechanisms. Likewise, models of cognitive systems have a rich tradition of making progress in many areas of cognitive science, yet to date, bilingualism is not one of them. With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Li is developing a large-scale computational model of bilingual vocabulary development. The modeling efforts are based on self-organizing connectionist networks that have been used previously in a number of areas of language research, including vocabulary development in monolingual children. Such self-organizing models are well-suited to questions of learning and development, in that these questions are naturally cast in terms of balancing competitive and cooperative interactions among system components. In the case of bilingual vocabulary development, the components can be construed as individual words from the languages being learned. By modeling vocabulary development in this way, Dr. Li is investigating how language learning is a fundamentally incremental process whereby bilingual knowledge and skills learned later in life build upon earlier language learning. This point has important implications for bilingual education, and the debilitating effects that brain trauma or disease can have on bilingual language processing.