Journal Article

Characterizing the social diversity of bilingualism using language entropy

Titone, Debra, Gullifer, Jason W.

2020

Overview

Bilingual and multilingual individuals exhibit variation in everyday language experience. Studies on bilingualism account for individual differences with measures such as L2 age of acquisition, exposure, or language proficiency, but recent theoretical perspectives posit that the relative balance between the two or more languages throughout daily life (i.e., interactional context ) is a crucial determinant for language representation, access, and control. We propose an innovative measure to characterize this construct by using entropy to estimate the social diversity of language use. Language entropy is computed from commonly-collected language history data and generalizes to multilingual communicative contexts. We show how language entropy relates to other indices of bilingual experience and that it predicts self-report L2 outcome measures over and above classic measures of language experience. Thus, we proffer language entropy as a means to characterize individual differences in bilingual (and multilingual) language experience related to the social diversity of language use.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Activities of daily living / Age of acquisition / Bilingualism / Brain / Censuses / Competence / Determiners / Diachronic Linguistics / Entropy / Everyday life / Experience / French as a second language / Individual differences / Language acquisition / Language diversity / Language Enrichment / Language history / Language Processing / Language proficiency / Language usage / Languages / Linguistic Performance / Multiculturalism & pluralism / Multilingualism / Principal components analysis / Scientific Concepts / Second language learning / Second Languages / Self report