Computational Approaches to Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology

Computational models allow researchers to formulate explicit theories of language acquisition, and to test these theories against natural language corpora. This chapter puts the problem of bilingual phonetic and phonological acquisition in a computational perspective. The main goal of the chapter is to show how computational modeling can be used to address crucial questions regarding bilingual phonetic and phonological acquisition, which would be difficult to address with other experimental methods. The chapter first provides a general introduction to computational modeling, using a simplified model of phonotactic learning as an example to illustrate the main methodological issues. The chapter then gives an overview of recent studies that have begun to address the computational modeling of bilingual phonetic and phonological acquisition, focusing on phonetic and phonological cues for bilingual input separation, bilingual phonology in computational models of speech comprehension, and computational models of L2 speech perception. The chapter concludes by discussing several key challenges in the development of computational models of bilingual phonetic and phonological acquisition.