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Determining bilingual status has been complicated by varying interpretations of what it means to be bilingual and how to quantify bilingual experience. We examined multiple indices of language dominance (self-reported proficiency, self-reported exposure, expressive language knowledge, receptive language knowledge, and a hybrid), and whether these profiles related to performance on linguistic and cognitive tasks. Participants were administered receptive and expressive vocabulary tasks in English and Spanish, and a nonlinguistic spatial Stroop task. Analyses revealed a relation between dominance profiles and cognate and nonlinguistic Stroop effects, with somewhat different patterns emerging across measures of language dominance and variable type (continuous, categorical). Only a hybrid definition of language dominance accounted for cognate effects in the dominant language, as well as nonlinguistic spatial Stroop effects. Findings suggest that nuanced effects, such as cross-linguistic cognate effects in a dominant language and cognitive control abilities, may be particularly sensitive to operational definitions of language status.
