When a seven is not a seven: Self-ratings of bilingual language proficiency differ between and within language populations
By Brendan Tomoschuk, Victor S. Ferreira, Tamar H. Gollan. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2018
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Self-ratings of language proficiency are ubiquitous in research on bilingualism, but little is known about their validity, especially when the same scale is used across different types of bilinguals. Self-ratings and picture naming data from 1044 Spanish–English and 519 Chinese–English bilinguals were analyzed in five between- and within-population comparisons. Chinese–English bilinguals scored more extremely than Spanish–English bilinguals, and in opposite directions at different endpoints of the self-ratings scale. Regrouping bilinguals by dominant language, instead of language membership, reduced discrepancies but significant group differences remained. Population differences appeared even in English, though this language is shared between populations. These results demonstrate significant problems with self-ratings, especially when comparing bilinguals of different language combinations; and subgroups of bilinguals who speak the same languages but vary in acquisition history and/or dominance. Objective proficiency measures (e.g., picture naming or proficiency interviews) are superior to self-ratings, to maximize classification accuracy and consistency across studies.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71032ac10134ca18894a76d9e3364a3cdf155383
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Citations in the corpus
- Characterizing the social diversity of bilingualism using language entropy (2019, methodology): “commonly elicited by standardized language history questionnaires, such as daily exposure to known languages or daily language use in various communicative contexts (see e.g., critiques raised by Gollan et al., 2012; Surrain & Luk, 2017; Tomoschuk et al., 2018).”