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.
Highlights
The concept of typological proximity/distance has long been a useful one in language science, but despite its intuitiveness on many levels, it remains maddeningly difficult to measure in any large-scale sense
Remaining consistent with the general theme of this Frontiers volume, we explore how a model that adopts some version of the INTEGRATION HYPOTHESIS can accurately model the typological proximity between entire linguistic systems
By implementing the compression algorithm in cognitively plausible ways (Anderson, 2013), our model aims to explain the various phenomena associated with bilingualism, as well as second language learning as grounded in the ways that general cognitive mechanisms interact with linguistic experience
Summary
The concept of typological proximity/distance has long been a useful one in language science, but despite its intuitiveness on many levels, it remains maddeningly difficult to measure in any large-scale sense. To the extent that any human language can be situated within a common space of possible languages implies that typological distance is measurable synchronically as well, regardless of its source This more synchronic conceptualization of typological proximity has played a larger role in second language acquisition research and related sub-disciplines, both explicitly (in various instantiations of the idea of contrastive analysis, going back at least to Lado, 1957), and implicitly (Recchia et al, 2010). What we argue here is that this integration provides a useful way of conceptualizing, and even measuring, the typological proximity of language pairs It can fill the gap in understanding the direct, synchronic relatedness of two grammars, independent of the diachronic histories that brought them to that point. We discuss the fundamental ontology of an integrated grammar and how typological similarities and differences can be accounted for in a clear and systematic way
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