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A quick, gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

ALEXANDRA L. DUNN  and
JEAN E. FOX TREE
ALEXANDRA L. DUNN
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
JEAN E. FOX TREE*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
*
Address for correspondence: Jean E. Fox Tree, Psychology Department, Social Sciences II room 277, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA [email protected]
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Abstract

The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998; Flege, Mackay & Piske, 2002): percent of language use for both languages, age of acquisition and age of comfort for both languages, and restructuring of language fluency due to changes in linguistic environments. Reaction times from a Spanish/English lexical translation task and filler rates and elongation rates from a Spanish/English sentence translation task support the validity of the scale. The scale can be adapted for nonliterate populations by asking questions verbally and recording responses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 273 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by faculty research funds granted by the University of California Santa Cruz. We thank Marc Brysbaert, Ping Li, Carmen Silva-Corvalán, Robin Wells, Margaret Wilson, and four anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We thank Nicole Wilson for allowing us to use her materials in the sentence translation task. We thank our many research assistants who aided in data collection and coding.

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