Language dominance in Turkish German bilinguals: methodological aspects of measurements in structurally different languages

The authors show that simple measures of fluency can reveal language dominance in bilinguals. These measures can be based onautomated procedures with the programme “Praat” that do not require any transcription of the spoken data. The authors compare oral narratives (descriptions of picture stories) of German-Turkish bilinguals with narratives of a control group of Turkish monolinguals who acquired German as a foreign language at school. Both groups have different dominance patternswhich can be shown with an established test in both languages. The control group is clearly Turkish-dominant whereas the bilinguals are German-dominant. Two indices of dominance were computed both manually and automated with the programme Praat: words per second and total amount of performance in each language. The validity of these indices is then analysed with a logistic regression where up to 90 % of group membership can be predicted and further corroborated with a discriminate analysis and a “leave-on-out classification” for group membership. This approach is universal in the sense that they have the potential to compare languageproficiency and language dominance between any given language pair