invariant entities (words, phonemes, syntactic patterns). In a dynamic
approach this invariance is highly problematic because every use of a word,
expression or construction will have an impact on the way it is represented
in the brain. As Spivey (2007) indicates:“I contend that cognitive psychol-
ogy’s traditional information processing approach ... places too much
emphasis on easily labeled static representations that are claimed to be
computed at intermittently stable periods over time”(4). He admits that
static representations are the cornerstone of the information processing
approach and that it will be difficult to replace them with a concept that is
more dynamic because what we have now is too vague and underspecified.
So far there is hardly any research on the stability of linguistic representa-
tions. De Bot and Lowie (2010) report on an experiment in which a simple
word-naming task of high frequency words was used. The outcomes show
that correlations between different sessions with the same subject and
between subjects were very low. In other words, a word that was reacted to
fast in one session could have a slow reaction in another session or indi-
vidual. This points to variation that is inherent in the lexicon and that results
from contact interaction and reorganization of elements in networks. Elman
(2005) phrases this as follows:
We might choose to think of the internal state that the network is in
when it processes a word as representing that word (in context), but it is
more accurate to think of that state as theresultof processing the word
rather than as a representation of the word itself.
(207)Additional evidence for the changeability of words and their meanings
comes from an ERP study by Nieuwland and Van Berkum (2006) who com-
pared ERP data for sentences like“The peanut was in love”versus“The
peanut was salted”. This type of anomaly typically leads to N400 reactions.
Then they presented the subjects with a story about a peanut that falls in
love. After listening to these stories, the N400 effects disappeared, which
shows that through discourse information the basic semantic aspects of
words can be changed.
8.3 Characteristics of CDST-based models of bilingual
processing
As may be clear from the argumentation so far, we may have to review some
of the basic assumptions of the information processing approach on which
our current models of multilingual processing are based. In the previous
section we have listed the main characteristics of these models and outlined
the problems related to them. From this follows that we need to develop
models that take into account the dynamic perspective in which time and
change are the core issues. As Spivey (2007) argues:
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