Assessing Language Dominance in Bilingual Acquisition: A Case for Mean Length Utterance Differentials  

Oleh:

Yip, Virginia ; Matthews, Stephen

Jenis: Article from Journal - e-Journal
Dalam koleksi: Language Assessment Quarterly vol. 3 no. 2 (2006), page 97-116.
Fulltext: LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT QUARTERLY, 3(2), 97–116.pdf (344.31KB)

Isi artikel

The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency.We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use.We discuss ways in which language dominance may be assessed, with a focus on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU). Comparison of MLU in the child’s 2 languages is subject to questions of comparability across languages. Using the Hong Kong Bilingual corpus of Cantonese–English children’s development, we showhowMLUdifferentials can be a viable measure of dominance that captures asymmetrical development where there is an imbalance between the child’s 2 languages. The directionality of syntactic transfer goes primarily from the language with higher MLU value to the language with lower MLUvalue, and theMLUdifferential matches the pervasiveness of transfer effects, as in the case of null objects discussed here:Thegreater the differential, themorefrequent the occurrence of null objects. Cantonese-dominant children with a largerMLUdifferential use null objects more frequently than those with a lowerMLUdifferential. In our case studies,MLUdifferentials also matched with language preferences and silent periods but did not predict the directionality of code-mixing.

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