During the early years, children's language skills are developing rapidly. For bilingual children, the development of both languages is highly sensitive to environmental input. Thus, capturing bilingualism in the early years poses a great challenge for researchers, especially those interested in examining how bilingualism might relate to other developmental areas, such as self-regulation. Traditionally, child development researchers have operationalized bilingualism as a categorical variable, most often relying on the use of self-reported data. In the present study, we compared various ways of capturing childhood bilingualism and demonstrated how these different measures privileged divergent aspects of children's bilingual experience, as well as how they were differentially related to children's self-regulation skills.

中文翻译：

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镜中的早期双语：拉丁裔学龄前儿童的语言和自我调节技能

在早期，儿童的语言技能发展迅速。对于双语儿童来说，两种语言的发展都对环境输入高度敏感。因此，在早年捕捉双语对研究人员来说是一个巨大的挑战，特别是那些有兴趣研究双语如何与其他发展领域（如自我调节）相关的研究人员。传统上，儿童发展研究人员将双语作为一个分类变量进行操作，通常依赖于使用自我报告的数据。在本研究中，我们比较了捕捉儿童双语的各种方法，并展示了这些不同的测量方法如何使儿童双语体验的不同方面具有特权，以及它们如何与儿童的自我调节技能有不同的关系。