Integrated, Not Isolated: Defining Typological Proximity in an Integrated Multilingual Architecture

Abstract

On the surface, bi- and multilingualism would seem to be an ideal context for exploring questions of typological proximity. The obvious intuition is that the more closely related two languages are, the easier it should be to implement the two languages in one mind. This is the starting point adopted here, but we immediately run into the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of cognitive, computational, and linguistic research on bi- and multilingualism exhibits a monolingual bias (i.e., where monolingual grammars are used as the standard of comparison for outputs from bilingual grammars). The primary questions so far have focused on how bilinguals balance and switch between their two languages, but our perspective on typology leads us to consider the nature of bi- and multi-lingual systems as a whole. Following an initial proposal from Hsin (2014), we conjecture that bilingual grammars are neither isolated, nor (completely) conjoined with one another in the bilingual mind, but rather exist as integrated source grammars that are further mitigated by a common, combined grammar (Cook, 2016; Goldrick et al., 2016a,b; Putnam and Klosinski, 2017). Here we conceive such a combined grammar in a parallel, distributed, and gradient architecture implemented in a shared vector-space model that employs compression through routinization and dimensionality reduction. We discuss the emergence of such representations and their function in the minds of bilinguals. This architecture aims to be consistent with empirical results on bilingual cognition and memory representations in computational cognitive architectures.

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

“…Bilingualism and monolingualism are gradient, as “there is no clear line between what constitutes bilingual versus monolingual experience” (Surrain & Luk, , p. 1). From a formal‐computational perspective, Putnam, Carlson, and Reitter () propose a gradient architecture to explain bilingual grammars. Valdés's () stipulation that HL speakers “may be, to some degree, bilingual” (p. 412) treats bilingualism as a continuum, as it allows any degree of variable bilingual skill, including productive or receptive, as a starting point or an end point of heritage language learning (cf.…”

Differential Access: Asymmetries in Accessing Features and Building Representations in Heritage Language Grammars

“…The concept of "differential access" is built upon the foundation of decades of research in cognitive neuroscience pointing toward the constant co-activation of both (or multiple) grammars in the mind of bilinguals throughout their lives (Abutalebi and Green 2007;Dijkstra 2005;Goral et al 2006;Kroll and Bialystok 2013;Marian and Spivey 2003;Putnam et al 2018;Sunderman and Kroll 2006;Van Heuven et al 2008; inter alia). As one of the source grammars becomes more dominant over the course of time, particular grammatical and processing preferences have the potential to override-or, in Grosjean (2008, p. 63) terms, "seep through"-the now less-dominant system.…”

“…In time, the representation of a particular phenomenon could be affected by these outputs in processing for comprehension and production. Research on cognitive neuroscience of bi/multilingualism conducted over the past three decades supports this position, showing that grammars are simultaneously active in the minds of bi/multilinguals, who may experience a certain level of crosslinguistic influence, as well as difficulties in accessing specific linguistic representations and lexical items during processing (for a complete review, see (Kroll and Gollan 2014;Putnam et al 2018)). In the present paper, we concentrate on the latter, providing empirical evidence in support of a differential access-view in heritage language development.…”

“…Assuming the parallel activation of Spanish and English in heritage speakers (Kroll and Gollan 2014;Marian and Spivey 2003;Putnam et al 2018; inter alia), it is expected that this group of bilinguals must overcome a series of structural as well as morphological contrasts across the two languages. The first one will be the realization that, while Spanish and English share a similar underlying structure for co-referential desiderative predicates, the former lacks optional control-OpC for short- ( As seen in the contrast between (7c) and (7d)-and further confirmed by the ungrammaticality of (7e)-Spanish desideratives cannot express disjoint reference by means of OpC-constructions.…”

The impact of Relative Language Distance on Bilingual Language Control – a functional imaging study

“…There is now increasing evidence indicating that the degree of typological similarity/difference between bilinguals' L1-L2 has a discernible impact on lexical processing (e.g., Casaponsa & Dunabeitia, 2016;Orfanidou & Sumner, 2005;Mosca et al, 2018), morphosyntax processing (e.g., Tolentino & Tokowicz, 2011 and references therein;Momenian et al, 2018;Putnam et al, 2018), second and third language learning (e.g. Ghazi-Saidi & Ansaldo, 2017;Cenoz et al, 2003) and even executive functioning (e.g., Coderre and van Heuven, 2014b;van Heuvan et al, 2011;Yang et al, 2017).…”