Bilingualism is not a categorical variable: Interaction between language proficiency and usage

By G. Luk, Ellen Bialystok. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2013

734 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bilingual experience is dynamic and poses a challenge for researchers to develop instruments that capture its relevant dimensions. The present study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 110 heterogeneous bilingual young adults. These questions concern participants' language use, acquisition history, and self-reported proficiency. The questionnaire responses and performances on standardised English proficiency measures were analysed using factor analysis. In order to retain a realistic representation of bilingual experience, the factors were allowed to correlate with each other in the analysis. Two correlating factors were extracted, representing daily bilingual usage and English proficiency. These two factors were also related to self-rated proficiency in English and non-English language. Results were interpreted as supporting the notion that bilingual experience is composed of multiple related dimensions that will need to be considered in assessments of the consequences of bilingualism.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5355beee3a7a1b5d12b1b7b17184e8d92f8315a

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Citations in the corpus

Language switching in picture naming: What asymmetric switch costs (do not) tell us about inhibition in bilingual speech planning (2013, background): “This objective goes hand in hand with developing improved ways of assessing bilingual language proficiency and dominance (see Luk & Bialystok, 2013).”
Understanding bilingual brain function and structure changes? U bet! A unified bilingual experience trajectory model (2020, background): “The degree to which adaptations occur to these demands is thus governed by the nature and degree of experience (Bialystok, 2016; Luk & Bialystok, 2013).”
Describing bilinguals: A systematic review of labels and descriptions used in the literature between 2005–2015 (2017, positive): “The first methodological difficulty in comparing bilinguals and monolinguals is that bilingualism is not a categorical variable; there is no clear line between what constitutes bilingual versus monolingual experience (Luk & Bialystok, 2013).”
Language History Questionnaire (LHQ3): An enhanced tool for assessing multilingual experience (2019, background): “Finally, it should be noted that proficiency, immersion, and dominance are complex constructs in multilingualism research and are often correlated with each other (see discussions in Luk & Bialystok, 2013; Treffers-Daller & Silva-Corvalán, 2015).”
Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers (2018, background): “Others argue in favour of limited advantages depending on degree of language usage (Luk & Bialystok, 2013), but determining the extent of these advantages at present is difficult (Valian, 2015).”
The Bilingual Adaptation: How Minds Accommodate Experience (2017, background): “As noted in Remaining Considerations, bilingualism is not a categorical variable (Luk & Bialystok, 2013), so comparisons between groups that are not in fact monolingual and bilingual will produce noise or null results (see discussion in Bialystok, 2016).”
Bilingualism and working memory capacity: A comprehensive meta-analysis (2017, background): “’s (2014) findings, proficiency in the L2 likely influences the effect size between monolinguals and bilinguals, but studies often treat bilingualism/monolingualism as a dichotomous variable rather than a continuous one, even though bilingualism is not a categorical variable (Luk and Bialystok, 2013”