Accelerated metalinguistic (phonological) awareness in bilingual children

Abstract

Pre‐school children (mean age 4.8 years) in matched monoglot English and bilingual Italian‐English kindergarten classes were given tests of (lexical and sublexical) metalinguistic awareness in English. Bilingual schoolchildren were superior to monolingual children at a task of spoken morpheme deletion (RAINBOW → BOW). They were also superior at detecting the odd‐one‐out from sets of pictured words when detection was meaning‐based and when it was initial‐phoneme based. The advantage to the bilingual group persisted for morpheme‐deletion and phonological sorting after partialling out performance on the meaning‐based task. Exposure to the second language (Italian) at a pre‐literate stage may improve metalinguistic skills. In particular, speech‐sound awareness, which is implicated in reading mastery, benefits from this support.

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