Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

Gita Martohardjono

Committee Members

Irina Sekerina

Martin Chodorow

Subject Categories

Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

Keywords

language dominance, bilingualism, individual variation

Abstract

This article-based dissertation addresses some of the issues regarding the multifaceted nature of bi/multilingualism, focusing on the significance of individual variation in the measurement of language dominance. While age of later-acquired languages has traditionally been used to classify bilingual speakers into early and late bilinguals, the construct of language dominance has emerged as an additional criterion of classification. However, despite its utility in capturing dimensions of language experience beyond age of acquisition, the construct of language dominance has its own challenges of measurement and individual variation.

This dissertation focuses on two open-ended challenges in the quantification of language dominance: how to measure the construct, and how individual variation can adequately be captured. The bilingual experience is often quantified through subjective measures such as questionnaires to capture multiple dimensions of bilingualism within one metric. However, questionnaires make it difficult to tease apart judgment of one’s language ability from actual ability. Objective measures directly measure language ability, but at the cost of being more time consuming and only able to capture one or two domains of dominance. Ideally, both subjective and objective measures can be utilized to capture the full range of language dominance. Additionally, at the core of quantifying language dominance is the notion that individual variation abounds based on a bilingual’s experiences (language history, current use, attitudes, etc.) and cognitive abilities (working memory, etc.). Individual variation is significant in both monolinguals and bilinguals, which often contradicts many group results (Bice & Kroll, 2021; Tanner & Van Hell, 2014, among others).

Through three articles with their own unique focuses and analyses, I address three global research questions: (1) How can an objective measure of individual language dominance capture the bilingual experience as effectively as subjective measures?, (2) How can gradient individual measures of language dominance adequately quantify processing in the L1 of bilingual speakers?, and (3) How can gradient individual measures of language dominance adequately quantify parsing in the L2 of bilingual speakers?

The first article, presented at NWAV47 and LSA93, probes the utility of an objective measure of oral fluency to capture the proficiency dimension of language dominance. I compare results of this objective measure to existing subjective measures that are used frequently in bilingual research. In Article 2, submitted to Glossa Psycholinguistics, I explore individual variation in L1 syntactic processing. I present results from an eye-tracking study in the Visual World with Spanish-English bilingual participants as they parse relative clause structures in the first-acquired language. Lastly, the third study which is published in Vincent Torrens’ Syntax Processing operationalizes individual variation in language dominance as it relates to ambiguity parsing in the later-acquired language. Using Mandarin-English bilinguals across a wide spectrum of language experience, I examine picture selection and response times when participants are faced with ambiguous doubly-quantified constructions.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the individuality of the bilingual experience and the challenges in capturing the construct of language dominance. I demonstrate the utility of an objective Relative Fluency measure to capture individual variation among bilingual speakers and show how a dynamic metric of language dominance can be successfully used as a predictor variable in psycholinguistic studies in both the first-learned and later-learned language.

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