Metalinguistic Awareness in Monolingual and Bilingual Children and its Relationship to Receptive Vocabulary Scores and Performance on a Reading Readiness Test

Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to attend to, and reflect upon, the properties of a language. Metalinguistic awareness is often assessed using tasks of phonological and syntactical awareness (see, e.g., Bialystok & Herman, 1999; Bowey, 1990; McGuiness, 2005, for reviews). Tests of phonological awareness usually require the analysis of sounds in words, whereas tests of syntactical awareness assess children’s understanding of the form and grammar of utterances. Importantly, past research has shown that metalinguistic awareness is positively correlated with improved reading ability in young children (see, e.g., Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl-Willos, 2001; Roth, Speece, Cooper & De LaPaz, 1996; Tunmer, 1989, for reviews). Previous research has also shown that metalinguistic awareness may be enhanced in bilingual children, because learning two languages may require one to focus on the properties of both languages ( (e.g., Bruck & Genesee, 1995; Chen, Anderson, Li, Hao, Wu & Shu, 2004; Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1990). Indeed, even limited exposure to a second language has been found to result in a phonological advantage (Yelland, Pollard, & Mercuri, 1993). However, it may not be bilingualism per se, but the languages themselves that affect children’s metalinguistic awareness, particularly in terms of syntactic awareness. For example, in Urdu and Spanish all nouns belong to either a masculine or feminine gender, although not all are marked for gender. The fact that Spanish and Urdu designate nouns as masculine and feminine means that other parts of language are also affected. In contrast, in English most nouns are gender neutral. Additionally, English is classified as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language, whereas Spanish is classified as Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) or as Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) language. In contrast, Urdu is a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language. Other differences exist between the languages, including the representation of time. In the present research, monolingual English-speaking children’s syntactic awareness on a grammatical judgment task will be compared to the performance of bilingual Urdu-English and bilingual Spanish-English children. Due to the differences between English, Spanish, and Urdu, bilingual children learning these languages must keep these differences separate in order to use each language effectively. It is predicted that this will lead to earlier and improved syntactic ability in bilingual children.