Describing bilinguals: A systematic review of labels and descriptions used in the literature between 2005–2015
By Sarah Surrain, G. Luk. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2017
197 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent years have seen a surge in research comparing bilinguals to monolinguals, yet synthesizing this literature is complicated by the diversity of language and social backgrounds behind these dichotomous labels. The current study examines the labels and descriptions reported in 186 studies comparing bilinguals and monolinguals published between 2005–2015 in order to understand how bilingualism has been operationalized and to describe the degree to which different facets of bilingual experience are reported. Proficiency and usage were the most frequently reported features (77% and 79%), followed by language history (67%) and the language of schooling (60%). However, less than half of the studies measured proficiency objectively or reported proportional usage, and even less – 30% – described the sociolinguistic context from which the sample was drawn. Given the increase in language contact due to globalization, more transparent and comprehensive reporting of participant characteristics is critical to building our understanding of how bilingualism affects experience.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d92a8e12f6ac50adfeb8b2445bb1ee68043f19aa
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Citations in the corpus
- The Advantages of Bilingualism Debate (2019, result): “Perhaps unsurprisingly, this stance has attracted criticism (Titone et al. 2017), as have Paap and colleagues’ repeated comparisons involving bilingual and monolingual young adults which, it is claimed, have misleadingly been presented as challenging the original findings from Bialystok’s group…”
- Characterizing the social diversity of bilingualism using language entropy (2019, methodology): “Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 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).”