Language Diversity and Language Debt: Approaching QuantCrit with Caribbean English and Spanish-English Heritage Bilinguals

Recent research on bilingualism has called for increasing engagement with the complexity and nuance of bilingual experience. Historically grounded in colonial comparisons to a monolingual ideal, the quantitative, empirical study of bilingualism is beginning to problematize this ideal and expand our knowledge of the diversity and heterogeneity of bilingual experience. Beyond diversity, an additional task for the next generation of bilingual language scientists is to address cumulative social harms that have been supported by deficit-oriented, normative comparisons to the monolingual ideal, which here I call the language “debt” ( Ladson-Billings, 2006 ). In this article, I draw from a burgeoning literature in economics, education and the learning sciences using quantitative methodologies from a critical perspective, or QuantCrit, to illustrate one opportunity for addressing language debt using examples from a novel electrophysiology study of multilingual speaker variation in sentence processing with Caribbean English– and Spanish-English–speaking young adults.