The BIA++: Extending the BIA+ to a dynamical distributed connectionist framework

Dijkstra and van Heuven have made an admirable attempt to develop a new model of bilingual memory, the BIA+. Their article presents a clear and well-reasoned theoretical justification of their model, followed by a description of their model. The BIA+ is, as the name implies, an extension of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra & Grainger, 1998; etc), which was itself an adaptation to bilingual memory of McClelland & Rumelhart’s (1981) Interactive Activation model of monolingual memory. The authors provide a wealth of background on bilingual memory cross-lingual interference and priming effects in what amounts to a veritable review of the literature in this area. The model that they propose is designed to account for many of these empirically observed effects. In what follows we will center our discussion around three points related to the design of their model. These issues are: • the use of modular vs. distributed representations; • learning; • emergence and self-organization of lexical items. We will discuss each of these points in turn.