Modeling the control of phonological encoding in bilingual speakers

Phonological encoding is the process by which speakers retrieve phonemic segments for morphemes from memory and use the segments to assemble phonological representations of words to be spoken. When conversing in one language, bilingual speakers have to resist the temptation of encoding word forms using the phonological rules and representations of the other language. We argue that the activation of phonological representations is not restricted to the target language and that the phonological representations of languages are not separate. We advance a view of bilingual control in which condition-action rules determine what is done with the activated phonological information depending on the target language. This view is computationally implemented in the WEAVER++ model. We present WEAVER++ simulations of the cognate facilitation effect (Costa, Caramazza and Sebastián-Gallés, 2000) and the between-language phonological facilitation effect of spoken distractor words in object naming (Hermans, Bongaerts, de Bot and Schreuder, 1998).