The bilingual advantage: a gender metalinguistic task in Arabic-English bilingual children

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Electronic versions

Documents

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)165-184
JournalJournal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Volume2
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 Dec 2020

Total downloads

No data available
View graph of relations