Sound communities: A quantitative proposal for studying bilingual speech

Bilingualism researchers have intensively studied how learning and using multiple languagesaffects all levels of linguistic structure. In this strand, examining diversity in the bilingualexperience and the extent to which variables like language dominance regulate crosslinguisticinteraction has been of special interest. However, most studies sample small groups of bilingualsfrom a single research site, creating a twofold generalizability problem. First, with small samplesit is unlikely that researchers will be able to fully capture and quantify the range of variablesknown to affect findings. Second, when bilinguals are recruited from a single site, it isimpossible to determine if findings are site-specific or apply to bilinguals more broadly. Toaddress these issues, we propose a large(r)-scale, multisite approach to bilingualism research. Webelieve that such an approach, when informed by open science practices, has the potential tosignificantly advance the state of the art.