There has been a surge in research on bilingualism and language production in the past two decades pointing to a trend in the scientific inquiry of this subset of linguistics. In the past decade, however, there seems to be more of an interest in bilingualism research with many of the important social features of this topic absent in the studies reviewed, according to this source. Ellen Bialystok reveals this gap in research in her article "Language Acquisition and Bilingualism: Consequences for a multilingual society". This correlational design used to contrast bilingualism studies versus language production studies is an effective tool for an up-to-date understanding of in what capacity research has already been completed and where further studies are needed. There is critical data that is lacking in the reviewed material, Bialystok believes and by looking at the data available, she suggests that since Canada is a very rich, culturally diverse country with a number of studies already being done on language acquisition as it relates to bilingualism, it is the ideal setting in which to do further research on what she refers to as environmental bilingualism.
We can verify that Bialystok uses a correlation study as she introduces the words bilingualism versus language production to demonstrate a relationship between the two. When she finds that there is a preponderance of negative (i.e. non-existent) pairing of the words in most research studies, she easily concludes that the word bilingualism is studied more and language production studied less. The dependent variable is the word bilingualism, as part of her hypotheses or suggestion for more, much needed study concentration is dependent on bilingualism as the most integral part of research. Language acquisition or production is the independent variable and is expected to be a part of study alone or independent of bilingualism, but in her opinion needed to further understanding of environmental bilingualism.
