Measuring Language Dominance in Early Spanish/English Bilinguals

This paper analyzes the comparability of language dominance assessments with the purpose of determining whether they yield similar results. Language dominance is an important construct in the field of bilingualism as it allows for a more thorough classification of bilinguals and is thought to play a role in both bilingual production and perception. Yet, there is no unified methodology for assessing language dominance. To that end, we ask the following research question: Do different language dominance measures predict the results of one another? Twenty-nine Spanish/English early bilinguals completed four language dominance assessments. Results indicate that three of the four assessments are highly correlated with each other while the fourth, a repetition task, is not significantly correlated with any of the assessments. Further, twenty of the participants were categorized differently across the individual measures; the more "balanced" a bilingual was, the greater likelihood of being categorized differently. These results indicate that certain language dominance assessments are not comparable with one another and suggest that it could be the case they do not even measure the same variable.