Towards computational models of multilingual sentence processing

Abstract

Although computational models can simulate aspects of human sentence processing, research on this topic has remained almost exclusively limited to the single language case. The current review presents an overview of the state of the art in computational cognitive models of sentence processing, and discusses how recent sentence-processing models can be used to study bi- and multilingualism. Recent results from cognitive modelling and computational linguistics suggest that phenomena specific to bilingualism can emerge from systems that have no dedicated components for handling multiple languages. Hence, accounting for human bi-/multilingualism may not require models that are much more sophisticated than those for the monolingual case.

Complexity in Multilingualism (Research)

“…Third, the features of the solutions to the model are studied using the concepts of dynamic systems theory, for example, those of stability or attractors. Here and in what follows, a model is simply a set of equations that have an interpretation in terms of a real-world target system (other types of models, e.g., models that do not aim at representing real-world targets or that are not naturally thought of as sets of equations, do not matter for our purposes; see Chuang, Bell, Banke, &Baayen, 2021, andFrank, 2021, in this volume for modeling approaches to multilingualism).…”