ACCELERATED METALINGUISTIC (PHONOLOGICAL) AWARENESS IN BILINGUAL-CHILDREN

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.