The bilingual advantage: a gender metalinguistic task in Arabic-English bilingual children
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- 2020 Bilingual Advantage
Accepted author manuscript, 338 KB, PDF document
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND Show licence
DOI
A finding that has not received much attention in the metalinguistic awareness literature is that bilingual children may be better at identifying gender mismatches between a subject and a predicate. This phenomenon is not well understood, nor has it been studied systematically. In the present study we present a systematic investigation of the phenomenon involving all three levels of metalinguistic awareness (identification of the mismatch, correction and explanation) in a language pair that has not been tested previously. We tested a group of six-year old Arabic-English bilingual children in comparison with two monolingual control groups. Results reveal that bilinguals performed better than monolinguals at the correction level. The study reveals a bilingual advantage in this population for the first time, while enhancing our knowledge of the development of metalinguistic awareness.
Keywords
- bilingualism, Arabic, language development, metalinguistic awareness, linguistics
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 165-184 |
Journal | Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech |
Volume | 2 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 24 Dec 2020 |
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