Entropy characterizes bilingual diversity

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.

双言和多言者在其日常语言体验上呈现出多样性。对双语现象的研究通过诸如二语习得年龄、接触或语言熟练度等指标来解释个体差异，但最新的理论视角提出，在日常生活中的两种或多种语言之间的相对平衡（即交互语境）是语言表征、获取和控制的至关重要的决定因素。我们提出一种创新性的度量方法，通过运用熵（ENTROPY）来估计语言使用的社交多样性，以表征这一结构。语言熵是从常见的语言历史数据中计算得出的，并推广到多语言交流情境中。我们展示了语言熵与其他双语体验指数之间的关系，以及它如何预测超越经典语言体验指标的自我报告的二语成果。因此，我们提出语言熵作为一种表征与语言使用社交多样性相关的双语（和多语）语言体验个体差异的手段。