dominance

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Maja,

    We've proposed using Mean Length Utterance differentials as a measure of language dominance:

Yip, Virginia and Stephen Matthews. 2007.The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact. Cambridge University Press. (Ch.3: Methodology)
Yip, Virginia and Stephen Matthews. 2006. Assessing language dominance in
bilingual acquisition: a case for Mean Length Utterance differentials. Language Assessment Quarterly 3: 97-116.

While absolute MLU comparisons are of questionable validity due to morphological differences between languages and how they are transcribed, MLU differentials can be used effectively to compare different children acquiring the same language pair, or different stages of development in the same child. In some domains there is evidence that the prevalence of cross-linguistic influence depends on the degree of dominance (see Yip and Matthews 2007: 150 for the case of null objects).

Virginia 
Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre
Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages
Chinese University of Hong Kong
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/lin/cbrc/

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