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Abstract
Bilingual experience is dynamic and poses a challenge for researchers to develop instruments that capture its relevant dimensions. The present study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 110 heterogeneous bilingual young adults. These questions concern participants' language use, acquisition history, and self-reported proficiency. The questionnaire responses and performances on standardised English proficiency measures were analysed using factor analysis. In order to retain a realistic representation of bilingual experience, the factors were allowed to correlate with each other in the analysis. Two correlating factors were extracted, representing daily bilingual usage and English proficiency. These two factors were also related to self-rated proficiency in English and non-English language. Results were interpreted as supporting the notion that bilingual experience is composed of multiple related dimensions that will need to be considered in assessments of the consequences of bilingualism.
This work was partially supported by grant R01HD052523 from the US National Institutes of Health and by grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Ellen Bialystok. The authors would like to thank Kelly Marchisio for transforming the questionnaire to electronic format.
Notes
1 A recent version of the LSBQ was designed (please contact [email protected] for a copy) and adopted electronically using the Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL; http://pebl.sourceforge.net/) so responses were directly entered into an electronic database. The script is available upon request from the corresponding author.