Call for abstracts for a special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism:
Bridging psycholinguistic and computational approaches to bilingualism
This special issue aims to bridge the gap between the scientific disciplines of multilingual language research, experimental psycholinguistics, and computational cognitive science. Computational modelling has long been a highly influential research method in the study of human language processing. In the last decade or so, the impact of computational simulations has further increased with the emergence of models with human-scale knowledge of language statistics as well as the availability of large-scale, high resolution behavioural and neurophysiological language processing data sets. However, relatively little computational work has focused on bi- and multilingualism. For example, large language models are, typically, massively multilingual yet they are rarely connected back to theories and data of human multilingualism (Frank & Shapiro, 2026). In this way, they are unlike more traditional, theory-driven computational models of bilingualism (such as BIA+; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002, and Bilingual Dual-Path; Frank & Khoe, 2025) that increase our understanding of the unique properties of comprehending, producing, or learning a non-native language, of acquiring two or more languages simultaneously, and of the interaction between multiple languages in one mind.
For the special issue, we encourage submissions of original work that connects/links computational models to human behavioural and neurophysiological data, or original work that employs modelling to test hypotheses about human multilingualism. By exploring how empirical, human-oriented approaches can be more tightly integrated and aligned with theoretical, computation-oriented methodologies, this special issue will showcase and bring together promising directions in the study of bilingual and multilingual cognition.
Editors: Edith Kaan (University of Florida); Stefan Frank (Radboud University); Irene Winther (Radboud University)
Timeline:
- 1 August 2026: one-page abstract submission to stefan.frank@ru.nl
- 1 September 2026: notification for abstract acceptance
- 1 March 2027: full manuscript deadline
- Before June 2027: feedback after first round of reviews
- 1 October 2027: revised manuscript deadline
- 1 February 2028: feedback after second round of reviews
- 1 April 2028: final manuscript deadline
- Individual articles will be published online when accepted. The special issue will be Issue 4 of 2028.
References
Dijkstra, T., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 175-197. https://doi.org/0.1017/S1366728902003012
Frank, S. L., & Khoe, Y. (2025). The Bilingual Dual-path model: Simulating bilingual production, comprehension, and development. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 15, 571-599. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.23072.kho
Frank, S. L., & Shapiro, N. T. (2026). Connectionist models of second language acquisition and processing. In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.