Resumen de Computational modeling of bilingualism: How can models tell us more about the bilingual mind?

Ping Li

• Models are no new beasts to scholars of bilingualism. During the last several decades we have seen many interesting and important models that postulate how the bilingual mind works. But specific, computationally implemented, models are far less common than general, verbal, models of bilingualism. This is because the former require efforts on the part of the researcher to conduct algorithmic and representational implementations, whereas the latter do not. The central question is: What good does implementation do in telling us about the bilingual mind beyond what the verbal models do? This Special Issue is an attempt to address this question with seven computational models of bilingualism from different research labs.