dominant language

[Bruno Estigarribia]

Forgive the silly question. This is not my field but the following 
struck me as counterintuitive so I want to make sure this is what was 
intended:
"For example, in order to be a highly proficient in a certain language a 
speaker does have to be dominant in that language."
Isn't the converse more intuitively sensible? You can, I guess, be 
highly proficient in two languages but (I want to say, by definition 
almost), only dominant in one of them. Am I missing something (perhaps 
in the literature) that contradicts this?
Just curious.
Bruno
-- 
Bruno Estigarribia
Research Assistant Professor
364A Davie Hall, CB #3270
Department of Psychology - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270
USA

> The first question here is how language dominance is defined. 
> Sometimes language dominance is used interchangeably with language 
> proficiency due to a definition of language dominance in terms of the 
> relative proficiency in two languages. However, these two constructs 
> can be distinguished in terms of psycholinguistic properties (See 
> Birdsong (2006) Dominance, proficiency, and second language 
> grammatical processing in /Applied Psycholinguistics/). Often language 
> dominance implies the superior performance on measures of fluency, 
> speed, automaticity, and accuracy in processing. For example, in order 
> to be a highly proficient in a certain language a speaker does have to 
> be dominant in that language. In addition, assessment of language 
> dominance is frequently based on the underlying assumption of uniform 
> superior performance in the dominant language. However, dominance in 
> one aspect of the language does not necessarily imply dominance in 
> others.
>  
> Katya
>
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 7:40 AM, Maja Roch <majaroch at gmail.com 
> <mailto:majaroch at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>     is anybody familiar with some possible criteria to be adopted for
>     establishing a dominant language of a bilingual child?
>     Best regards,
>     Maja Roch
>
>     --
>     You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>     Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
>     To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com
>     <mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>.
>     To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
>     info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com
>     <mailto:info-childes%2Bunsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
>     For more options, visit this group at
>     http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
>
>
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google 
> Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
> To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at 
> http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.