The early research on children was poorly done – it was not well controlled, it was poorly designed and had many other problems. The research with children and cognition has been around for a long time, mostly focused on studies of children and language abilities, children and literacy abilities, but the paper in 2004 by Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues was the first that looked at this question with adults. Using this approach, it is not necessary to divide people into groups but just say that there is ‘a range of bilingualism’. On the basis of that information, participants are given a score – a bilingualism score – where a higher score means ‘more bilingual’. In our research, we have a rather detailed questionnaire that we give to the participants in which they answer lots of questions about their language proficiency, about their language use, about who speaks what to whom in their homes and so forth. The second approach is to say ‘bilingualism is actually a continuum’. Using that approach the researchers usually end up with two groups, but they need to exclude people who are ambiguous and end up excluding a lot of people, because it is not clear if they are monolingual or bilingual. There are two approaches: in some studies there is a criterion like ‘a person who has spoken two languages on a regular basis for most of their lives with high fluency is bilingual’ and people who maybe have less proficiency and so forth are essentially monolingual. Everyone has some kind of experience with different languages, so the first problem that has to be dealt with in the research on bilingualism is how to define the populations for a particular study. Contrary to almost everything else that is studied in psychology, bilingualism is not a dichotomy: one is not one or the other, one is not monolingual or bilingual. One of the most difficult problems in conducting this research is how to define bilingualism.
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