Dual-language testing improves bilinguals’ verbal scores

Abstract

Objective: Research demonstrates that college educated, English language dominant bilinguals underperform relative to English speaking monolinguals on tests of verbal ability. We investigated whether accepting responses in their two languages would reveal improved performance in bilinguals, and whether such improvement would be of sufficient magnitude to demonstrate the same performance level as monolinguals. Method: Participants were college students attending the same university. Spanish-English bilinguals were compared to English speaking monolinguals on the Bilingual Verbal Ability Tests (BVAT), which include Picture Vocabulary, Oral Vocabulary, and Verbal Analogies. Results: When given the opportunity to respond in Spanish to items failed in English, bilinguals obtained significantly higher scores on all three subtests, and their performance matched that of monolinguals on Oral Vocabulary and Verbal Analogies. Conclusion: An “either-language” scoring approach may enable optimal measurement of verbal abilities in bilinguals. We provide normative data for use in applying the either-language scoring approach on subtests of the BVAT. We discuss the findings in the context of clinical assessment.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• dual-language assessment
• verbal ability
• picture naming
• norms

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Samantha Gestido, Maria Morales, Alejandra Quintero, and Abraham Yacaman for their superb work and contribution to all aspects of this project. We are also thankful to Morgan Musgrove for training and supervising students on data collection in the early stages of the project. We thank all other students who tirelessly recruited and tested participants. This work would not have been possible without them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation, Award No. BCS-1632377.