The Switching Experience and Environment Questionnaire (SEEQ): Testing a new integrated measure of bilingual switching behaviours

We tested the factorial structure of a newly devised language switching measure, the Switching Experience and Environment Questionnaire (SEEQ), on a diverse online sample of 231 young bilingual adults. We investigated the fit of a predefined factorial structure of bilingual usage and experience, which reflects distinctions made in the Adaptive Control Hypothesis (ACH, Green & Abutalebi, 2013) and the Unified Bilingual Experience Trajectory Model (UBET; DeLuca et al., 2020). While a confirmatory factor analysis of a full structure with eight factors did not converge, a factorial structure with the four factors Dominance/Duration of Bilingualism, Intensity/Diversity of Language Use, Dual-Language Environment and Dense Code-Switching Environment converged and showed a good model fit. The underlying measures of these factors corresponded with our theoretical expectations about different language usage and history patterns. We discuss the factors with regard to their expected impact on cognitive control.