On the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Relative Language Strength in Bilinguals: Evidence from Korean Heritage Speakers

Language loss is a pressing concern for many of the world's languages. A major obstacle to the early diagnosis of language loss and to the assessment of language maintenance efforts is the absence of an easy-to-use psycholinguistic measure of language strength. We have developed a series of simple psycholinguistic tasks that exploit the fact that the relative strength of two languages is reflected in the speed with which their words and structure-building routines are accessed in the course of speech. Test results can therefore be used to assess language attrition and revitalization in bilingual communities of many different types.