ABSTRACT
Metalinguistic awareness is a concept that emerged from the study of bilingualism. Starting in the 1970s, researchers began to document a so-called bilingual advantage, which refers to more advanced capacities of children who are bilingual in performing certain tasks that require the ability to be aware of linguistic patterns, despite the fact that bilinguals have been documented having more limited vocabularies in each of their languages. Metalinguistic awareness has been studied in all four major domains of linguistics, including phonology, morpho-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Metalinguistic awareness, outside of the study of bilingualism, has been studied intensively in the context of children’s developing literacy abilities. Researchers on metalinguistic awareness have used the construct to investigate basic cognitive aspects of language and literacy development by comparing children’s development across languages with varying syntactical and orthographic typologies (alphabetic, alphabeto-syllabic, logographic).
