TY - JOUR

T1 - The bilingual advantage: a gender metalinguistic task in Arabic-English bilingual children

AU - Althobaiti, Huda

AU - Sanoudaki, Eirini

AU - Kotzoglou, George

N1 - If required by their institutions, authors may post the post-refereed Accepted Manuscript version of the article in their Institutional Repository (only) with the appropriate acknowledgement with an embargo period on public access of 24 months from the date of official publication. They may do this upon acceptance of their mss but the institution may not provide public access until the embargo period has expired and when it does so, it must be under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence

PY - 2020/12/24

Y1 - 2020/12/24

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - bilingualism

KW - Arabic

KW - language development

KW - metalinguistic awareness

KW - linguistics

U2 - 10.1558/jmbs.14237

DO - 10.1558/jmbs.14237

M3 - Article

VL - 2

SP - 165

EP - 184

JO - Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech

JF - Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech

SN - 2631-8407

IS - 2

ER -