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Research on bilingualism has in recent years accelerated at "a dizzying pace" (Kroll & de Groot, 2005). Yet, despite the now thousands of studies, there is still no standard method for determining language proficiency, degree of bilingualism, and language dominance. Uniformity in how language dominance is assessed is tremendously important for advancing knowledge about the effects of bilingualism on language processing and cognition, and for interpretation of outcomes observed in experimental studies, and in clinical settings. Some effects obtained will apply only to some types of bilinguals (e.g., the cognitive advantages of bilingualism may be observed only in highly proficient bilinguals), but without a system for classifying bilinguals into types it will be impossible to identify precisely which aspect of bilingualism is critical in each case. A standard method for determining proficiency and dominance across multiple types of bilinguals would go a long way towards clarifying the associated theoretical implications.
One of the most broadly used approaches to assessing bilingual language proficiency are self-ratings (Li, Sepanski & Zhao, 2006). Bilinguals are often asked to rate their abilities in each language, and multiple studies have shown that self-ratings are significantly correlated with objectively measured proficiency on a broad variety of measures (e.g., in one study, significant correlations were reported between self-ratings and reading fluency, reading comprehension, picture naming, auditory comprehension, sound awareness, receptive vocabulary, and grammaticality judgment speed and accuracy; see Marian, Blumenfeld & Kaushanskaya, 2007). These correlations are often highly robust (significant at the p < .01 level), and can also be moderate or large in size (especially for ratings of a non-dominant language which were as high as .74 in some cases in Marian et al., 2007).
However, correlations between self-reported proficiency and objective measures of proficiency are far from perfect, and they do not address a different question, which is: How accurately can bilinguals classify themselves into language dominance groups? Some have argued that bilinguals are "notoriously bad" (Dunn & Fox Tree, 2009, p. 275) at providing such ratings (Hakuta & D'Andrea, 1992), and the issue of measuring bilingual language proficiency and dominance is timely (e.g., Bedore et al., 2011; Daller, 2011; Treffers-Daller, 2011), but no studies considered how accurately bilinguals report which language is dominant on...