Facets of metalinguistic awareness related to reading development in Hebrew: Evidence from monolingual and bilingual children

2008 ◽  
pp. 166-199
Keyword(s):  
Reading Development ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness

Early emergence of syntactic awareness and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s judgments

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson ◽  
Elena Nicoladis
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Preschool Age ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Syntactic Awareness ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
French And English ◽  
Better Than

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French–English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective–noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability.

Metalinguistic aspects of bilingual processing

2001 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 169-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Bialystok
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Syntactic Awareness ◽  
Alternate Conception ◽  
Bilingual Processing ◽  
And Control ◽  
Metalinguistic Ability

This chapter examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, but equally, other studies have found either no difference between the groups, or, in some cases, monolingual advantages. In the discussion of each of these areas, the kinds of tasks for which bilingual and monolingual children perform differently are identified. In none of these three subcategories of metalinguistic awareness do bilingual children exhibit a uniform and consistent advantage over monolinguals. An alternate conception of metalinguistic ability is proposed in which two cognitive processes, analysis and control, are directly responsible for task performance. These processes are involved in all metalinguistic tasks but to different degrees. Re-examining the results in this way reveals that bilingual advantages occur reliably on tasks that make high demands on control but are not evident in tasks that make high demands on analysis. The implications of this pattern for metalinguistic ability are considered.

Impact of orthographic transparency on typical and atypical reading development: Evidence in French-Spanish bilingual children

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 1177-1190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Lallier ◽  
Sylviane Valdois ◽  
Delphine Lassus-Sangosse ◽  
Chloé Prado ◽  
Sonia Kandel
Keyword(s):  
Reading Development ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Orthographic Transparency

Metalinguistic contribution to reading comprehension: A comparison of Primary 3 students from China and Singapore

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-684
Author(s):  
Sun Baoqi ◽  
Guangwei Hu ◽  
Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Morphological Awareness ◽  
Home Language ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Syntactic Awareness

AbstractThis study examined the within- and cross-language metalinguistic contribution of three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness) to reading comprehension in monolingual Chinese-speaking children from Mainland China (n = 190) and English–Chinese bilingual children from Singapore (n = 390). Moreover, the effect of home language use on the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and reading performance was investigated. For monolingual children, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after partialing out the effects of age, nonverbal intelligence, and oral vocabulary, syntactic awareness uniquely predicted 7%–13% of the variance in reading comprehension measures, whereas this relationship was not observed between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. For the bilingual children, within-language regression analyses revealed that English/Chinese morphological awareness and syntactic awareness both contributed significantly to English/Chinese reading measures over and above vocabulary and phonological awareness. Cross-linguistically, structure equation modeling results demonstrated that the bilingual children’s English and Chinese metalinguistic awareness were closely related and jointly supported reading comprehension in both languages, thus lending support to Koda’s transfer facilitation model. Furthermore, home language use was found to contribute to the bilingual children’s reading proficiency via its impact on metalinguistic awareness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy and pedagogical implications that can be drawn from these findings.

The metalinguistic benefits of limited contact with a second language

1993 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Yelland ◽  
Jacinta Pollard ◽  
Anthony Mercuri
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Reading Acquisition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Major Step ◽  
Language Program ◽  
Bilingual Group

ABSTRACTThis study examined whether the often-reported metalinguistic benefits of childhood bilingualism extend to children whose experience with a second language is considerably more limited, and if so, whether this metalinguistic advantage flows on to reading acquisition. Its purpose was to provide direct evidence of a causal role for metalinguistic awareness in reading acquisition. The study focused on the developing word awareness skills of two groups of preparatory and grade 1 children: one group was strictly monolingual in English; the other, the “marginal bilingual” group, consisted of English monolingual who were participating in a second language program that provided I hour of Italian instruction each week.After only 6 months of instruction in Italian, the marginal bilingual children showed a significantly higher level word awareness than their monolingual counterparts. This advantage weakened across grade 1, as both groups approached ceiling levels of performance. Nonetheless, the initial advantage flows through to the first major step in reading acquisition, with the grade 1 marginal bilinguals showing significantly greater word recognition skill than the monolinguals, thus strengthening the argument for a causal role in reading acquisition for word awareness.

Influences of bilingualism on metalinguistic development

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Bialystok
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Components Analysis ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Metalinguistic Ability

The relationship between metalinguistic awareness and bilingualism is interpreted in terms of a framework which defines metalinguistic awareness as consisting of two processing components: analysis of linguistic knowledge, and control of linguistic processes. It is argued that bilingualism enhances only the latter of these processing components, so global assessments of metalinguistic ability by bilingual subjects are bound to lead to inconsistent results. Some studies are reported in which these two processing components are separated. Bilingual children are shown to be superior to monolingual children on measures of control of linguistic processes.

Bilingual Advantage

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huda Qalil Althobaiti ◽  
Eirini Sanoudaki ◽  
George Kotzoglou
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Bilingual Advantage ◽  
Mismatch Correction ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
First Time ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Language Pair

A finding that has not received much attention in the metalinguistic awareness literature is that bilingual children may be better at identifying gender mismatches between a subject and a predicate. This phenomenon is not well understood, nor has it been studied systematically. In the present study we present a systematic investigation of the phenomenon involving all three levels of metalinguistic awareness (identification of the mismatch, correction and explanation) in a language pair that has not been tested previously. We tested a group of six-year-old Arabic–English bilingual children in comparison with two monolingual control groups. Results reveal that bilinguals performed better than monolinguals at the correction level. The study reveals a bilingual advantage in this population for the first time, while enhancing our knowledge of the development of metalinguistic awareness.

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