Bilingualism and the Development of Metalinguistic Awareness

Abstract

Tasks designed to assess children's level of metalinguistic awareness and their ability to evaluate contradictory and tautological statements were administered in Ireland to grade 3 and grade 6 English-Irish bilingual children and control groups of unilingual children matched on IQ, SES, sex, and age. At both grade levels the bilingual children showed a greater awareness of certain properties of language and were better able to evaluate contradictory statements. It is suggested that bilingualism can increase the child's metalinguistic awareness and promote an analytic orientation to linguistic input.