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Assessing language dominance in Mandarin–English bilinguals: Convergence and divergence between subjective and objective measures*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2013

LI SHENG ,
YING LU  and
TAMAR H. GOLLAN
LI SHENG*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
YING LU
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
TAMAR H. GOLLAN
Affiliation:
University of California San Diego
*
Address for correspondence: Li Sheng, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin, 2504-A Whitis Ave., Austin, TX 78705, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

This study examines the convergence and divergence between subjective and objective measures of language proficiency for assessing language dominance in Mandarin–English bilinguals. Sixty-two young adults (Experiment 1) and 27 children (Experiment 2) provided self-ratings of proficiency level (or were rated by their parents), were interviewed for spoken proficiency, and named pictures in the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and (in Experiment 1 only) the Boston Naming Test. In Experiment 1, the four measures converged in the number of people classified into different dominance groups but both naming tests indicated greater English dominance than self-report and interview measures. In Experiment 2, parent report and interview measures converged in dominance classifications but the MINT indicated higher degrees of English dominance. To a large extent bilinguals were able to classify themselves (or their children) into dominance groups but some mismatches between measures in dominance classification were observed for all age and dominance groups. These results, together with previous findings with Spanish–English bilingual adults (Gollan et al., 2012), suggest that bilinguals may shift to English dominance in confrontation naming before they do so in conversational fluency, and that dominance shifts persist throughout the lifespan but may be relatively more pronounced in children. These findings caution against the use of self-reports as the sole means of classifying bilinguals into dominance groups and support a multi-measure approach including direct assessment of the relevant linguistic domain.

Keywords

language dominanceproficiencyMandarinEnglishpicture naming
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 364 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The authors thank Brooke Lauper for assistance with data collection and Arthur Samuel and Angel Chan for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by R01 grants (NIDCD 011492, NICHD 050287 and NICHD 051030).

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