A manifestation of the bilingual disadvantage in college-level writing

While bilingual ability can add richness to one’s life, bilingualism has been demonstrated to hamper lexical access, verbal fluency and vocabulary size of the targeted language. Although in higher education the quality of one’s writing is a great indicator of success, little research has explored how bilingual disadvantages translate into written expression. The current study utilized the written portion of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) to compare performance between monolingual and bilingual college students, with the Raven Progressive Matrices providing baseline nonverbal intelligence and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software providing an objective analysis of the written samples. Bilingual students wrote fewer words and tended to receive a lower score on the PIAT than monolingual students, while showing a similar level of competency in other measures of quality of writing. Results suggest that bilinguals may be at a disadvantage on English writing tasks that are time constrained.