Towards a localist-connectionist model of word translation

Abstract

Word translation is among the most sophisticated skills that bilinguals can perform. Brysbaert and Duyck (2010) have argued that the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM; Kroll & Stewart, 1994), a verbal model for word translation in beginning and proficient bilinguals, should be abandoned in favor of connectionist models such as the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (BIA+; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). However, the partially implemented BIA+ model for bilingual word recognition has neither been applied to bilinguals of different proficiency levels nor extended to the complex process of word translation. After considering a number of aspects of the RHM, a new localist-connectionist model, called Multilink, is formulated to account for the performance of bilinguals differing in their L2 proficiency in different tasks: lexical decision, language decision, and word translation.