Patterns of object naming often differ between languages, but
bilingual speakers develop convergent naming patterns in
their two languages that are distinct from those of
monolingual speakers of each language. This convergence
appears to reflect dynamic interactions between lexical
representations for the two languages. In this study, we
present a self-organizing neural network model to simulate
semantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon and investigate
mechanisms underlying semantic convergence. Our results
demonstrate that connections between two languages can be
established through the simultaneous activations of related
words in both languages, and these connections between two
languages pull the two lexicons toward each other. These
results suggest that connections between words in the
bilingual lexicon play a major role in bilinguals’ semantic
convergence. The model provides a foundation for exploring
how various input variables will affect bilingual patterns of
output.