Quantifying Language Experience in Heritage Language Development

Abstract

Variation in language experience is a key characteristic of heritage language development. To understand the impact of these varying experiences on children’s heritage language outcomes, researchers typically collate and quantify specific aspects of children’s language input, transforming or reducing them into other more general variables, such as language richness as a measure of input quality and amount of language exposure as a measure of input quantity. This chapter presents an overview of the most frequently used method of operationalizing language experience in bilingual language acquisition research, namely the parental questionnaire. It outlines some conceptual and practical issues surrounding parental questionnaires as a means of quantifying bilingual language experience as well as reviewing a number of questionnaires used in recent studies in more detail.