Sound communities: A quantitative proposal for studying bilingualism in context

Bilingualism researchers have intensively studied how learning and using multiple languages affects all levels of linguistic structure. In this strand, examining diversity in the bilingual experience and the extent to which variables like language dominance regulate crosslinguistic interaction has been of special interest. However, most studies have sampled a small group of bilinguals from a single research site, which creates a twofold generalizability problem. First, with small samples it is unlikely that researchers will be able to fully capture and quantify the range of variables known to affect findings. Second, when bilinguals are recruited from a single site, it is impossible to determine if findings are site-specific or apply more broadly. To address these issues, we propose a large(r)-scale, multisite approach to bilingualism research. We believe that such an approach, when informed by open science practices, has the potential to significantly advance the state of the art.