dominance

[Jeanine Treffers-Daller]

Dear Maja
I have proposed a measure based on indices of lexical richness, which can be used with children as well as adults.
This article will appear next year in the International Journal of Bilingualism.

Treffers-Daler, J. (in press) Operationalising and measuring language dominance.

Can send you an advance copy if you're interested.

best wishes
Jeanine
Abstract
The aim of this article is to show how measures of lexical richness (Guiraud 1954; Malvern, Richards, Chipere and Durán, 2004) can be used to operationalise and measure language dominance among bilinguals. A typology of bilinguals is proposed based on these measures of lexical richness, and the validity of the typology is then investigated in an empirical study among two groups of bilingual informants with different language dominance profiles (25 Dutch-French bilinguals from Brussels and 24 French-English bilinguals from Paris). The most important advantage of the proposed operationalisation is that it allows researchers carry out precise measurements of bilingual ability in languages or language varieties for which no standardised tests exist and that these measures can be calculated on oral data that have been collected in an informal and unobtrusive way, in a naturalistic setting.

best wishes
Jeanine
=========================
Professor Jeanine Treffers-Daller
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities
Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol
BS16 1QY
tel. 00-44-117-3282390
Room 4D02

________________________________
From: info-childes at googlegroups.com [info-childes at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Brian MacWhinney [macw at cmu.edu]
Sent: 25 March 2010 16:31
To: CHILDES
Subject: dominance

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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