Tomić Aleksandra, Rodina Yulia, Bayram Fatih, De Cat Cécile
Department of Language and Culture, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2023 May 23;14:1131374. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1131374. eCollection 2023.
There exists a great degree of variability in the documentation of multilingual experience across different instruments. The present paper contributes to the "methods turn" and individual differences focus in (heritage) bilingualism by proposing a comprehensive online questionnaire building on existing questionnaires and the experience of using them to document heritage bilingualism: the Heritage Language Experience (HeLEx) online questionnaire. HeLEx is validated against and contrasted to an extended version of the Language and Social Background Questionnaire designed for heritage speakers (HSs), LSBQ-H.
We compare data elicited with both questionnaires in turn from a group of Turkish HSs ( = 174, mean age=32). Our validation focuses on traditional language background variables, including language exposure and use, language proficiency, language dominance, as well as a more novel measure of language entropy. The analyses are based on a subset of key questions from each questionnaire that capture language experience for up to five languages, four modalities, and five social contexts. In a subsequent set of analyses, we explore the impact of different types of response scales, response mechanisms, and manners of variable derivation on the informativity of the data they can provide, in terms of the scope, granularity and distributional properties of the derived measures.
Our results show that both HeLEx and LSBQ-H are successful at detecting the important distributional patterns in the data and reveal a number of advantages of HeLEx. In the discussion, we consider the impact of methodological choices regarding question phrasing, visual format, response options, and response mechanisms. We emphasize that these choices are not trivial and can affect the derived measures and subsequent analyses on the impact of individual differences on language acquisition and processing.
不同工具对多语言经历的记录存在很大差异。本文通过在现有问卷及其用于记录传承双语现象的经验基础上，提出一份全面的在线问卷——传承语言经历（HeLEx）在线问卷，为（传承）双语研究中的“方法转向”和个体差异关注做出贡献。HeLEx与为传承语使用者（HSs）设计的《语言与社会背景问卷》扩展版（LSBQ-H）进行了验证对比。
我们依次比较了从一组土耳其传承语使用者（n = 174，平均年龄 = 32岁）中用这两份问卷收集的数据。我们的验证聚焦于传统语言背景变量，包括语言接触和使用、语言熟练度、语言优势，以及一种更新颖的语言熵测量方法。分析基于每份问卷中的一组关键问题子集，这些问题涵盖了多达五种语言、四种模态和五种社会背景下的语言经历。在后续的一组分析中，我们从所导出测量指标的范围、粒度和分布特性方面，探讨不同类型的回答量表、回答机制以及变量推导方式对它们所能提供数据的信息性的影响。
我们的结果表明，HeLEx和LSBQ-H在检测数据中的重要分布模式方面都很成功，并揭示了HeLEx的一些优势。在讨论中，我们考虑了在问题措辞、视觉格式、回答选项和回答机制等方法选择上的影响。我们强调这些选择并非微不足道，可能会影响所导出的测量指标以及后续关于个体差异对语言习得和处理影响的分析。
