Alternative measures of bilingualism

Abstract

A variety of techniques for the measurement and description of bilingualism, derived separately from the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and sociology, were administered to the same respondents, 48 Spanish-English bilinguals who lived in a Peurto Rican neighborhood near New York, in order to assess the relationship among these measures and their relative utility as predictors of four proficiency criterion variables. A factor analysis, performed on the intercorrelations among 124 scores, indicated areas of interdisciplinary overlap as well as uniqueness. The best predictors of the criteria were obtained from retrospective reports of proficiency and usage. However, scores from other techniques provided significant increments in the cumulative prediction of the four proficiency criteria, a very high proportion of whose variance was explainable through multiple regression analysis.