Metalinguistic Awareness

During the last 30 years of the 20th century, a significant body of research in psychology and psycholinguistics was carried out, relating to the relationship between early bilingualism and cognitive (intellectual) development: specifically on the subject of metalinguistic awareness. Most of this research defined early bilingualism as young children's (ages 4 to 8 years old) ability to speak and repeatedly use two languages. Metalinguistic awareness refers to a specific cognitive skill that generally accounts for an expressed ability to contemplate language and to understand and use an array of linguistic constructs, rules, norms, and patterns.

Until the mid-20th century, before studies evaluated metalinguistic awareness specifically, as a differential outcome between bilinguals and monolinguals, much of the work assessing the relationship between early bilingualism and cognition suggested a negative relationship between these two variables—cognition measured as performance on standardized tests of intelligence. This meant that bilingual children were found to score lower than their monolingual peers. These conclusions, however, have now been largely abandoned because the research methods and designs of those initial studies contained serious flaws.

As research designs, methods, assessment tools, and techniques were improved, evidence demonstrated [Page 552]certain cognitive benefits of bilingualism in young children. Several controlled studies, including a seminal Canadian paper discussed later in this entry, found as early as the 1960s that bilingual children demonstrated favorable outcomes with regard to their developing conceptions of language, referred to as metalinguistic awareness, when compared with monolingual children. This meant that bilingual children were found to demonstrate more developed understandings of linguistic constructs, and thus were able at earlier ages to make letter-sound associations, separate sound from meaning, interpret semantic attributes, develop understandings about vocabulary, and comprehend syntactic structure.

More recently, however, studies assessing whether bilingual children have superior metalinguistic abilities when compared with their monolingual counterparts have produced mixed results. Most of the published research supports an advantage for bilingual children, but other studies show either no difference or a disadvantage for them. Ellen Bialystok, a Canadian psychologist and professor at York University, who has published extensively on the topic, has presented a model to account for the mixed research findings. She describes metalinguistic awareness as a two-prong cognitive process rather than as a cognitive ability. Bialystok concludes that bilingual children are able to outperform mono-linguals on some metalinguistic tasks because they demonstrate better control of attention in real time, not because they are necessarily superior on any specified cognitive domain. This entry describes the research on metalinguistic development.