The primary goal of research on the functional and neural architecture of bilingualism is to elucidate how bilingual individuals' language architecture is organized such that they can both speak in a single language without accidental insertions of the other, but also flexibly switch between their two languages if the context allows/demands them to. Here we review the principles under which any proposed architecture could operate, and present a framework where the selection mechanism for individual elements strictly operates on the basis of the highest level of activation and does not require suppressing representations in the non-target language. We specify the conjunction of parameters and factors that jointly determine these levels of activation and develop a theory of bilingual language organization that extends beyond the lexical level to other levels of representation (i.e., semantics, morphology, syntax and phonology). The proposed architecture assumes a common selection principle at each linguistic level to account for attested features of bilingual speech in, but crucially also out, of experimental settings.

双语功能和神经结构研究的主要目标是阐明双语个体的语言结构是如何组织的，这样他们既可以用一种语言说话而不会意外插入另一种语言，也可以在两种语言之间灵活切换，如果上下文允许/要求他们这样做。在这里，我们回顾了任何提议的架构可以运行的原则，并提出了一个框架，其中单个元素的选择机制严格基于最高级别的激活运行，并且不需要抑制非目标语言中的表示。我们指定了参数和因素的结合，共同决定了这些激活级别，并开发了一种双语语言组织理论，该理论超越了词汇级别，扩展到其他级别的表示（即语义、形态、句法和语音）。所提出的架构假设在每个语言级别都有一个共同的选择原则，以解释双语语音在实验环境中的证明特征，但至关重要的是，在实验环境之外。