ABSTRACT
A high positive correlation has been found between preschool performance on metalinguistic tests and scores on reading and writing tests carried out when the child has started school. Twenty parents of the participating children volunteered to join in the study. The parents were asked to take notes on how their child went about working with writing and reading. The reading and writing behavior of one of these children was the starting point of the author's interest into this field of research. According to the parent's answers in the questionnaire, children were brought up in a stimulating 'written language' milieu. A prerequisite for the grammatical metalanguage activities is that a static language object is created. The principle of invariance states that each unit is seen as having a set of defining phonetic and graphic properties, such that whenever this unit occurs, the corresponding features will also occur.
