Bialystok Ellen, Peets Kathleen F, Moreno Sylvain
York University.
Ryerson University.
Appl Psycholinguist. 2014 Jan 1;35(1):177-191. doi: 10.1017/S0142716412000288.
This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124 children in second and fifth grades who were enrolled in either a French immersion or a regular English program. All children were from monolingual English-speaking homes and attended local public schools in middle socioeconomic neighborhoods. Measures included morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, and verbal fluency, with all testing in English. These tasks differed in their need for executive control, a cognitive ability that is enhanced in bilingual children. Overall, the metalinguistic advantages reported in earlier research emerged gradually, with advantages for tasks requiring more executive control (grammaticality judgment) appearing later and some tasks improving but not exceeding performance of monolinguals (verbal fluency) even by fifth grade. These findings demonstrate the gradual emergence of changes in metalinguistic concepts associated with bilingualism over a period of about 5 years. Performance on English-language proficiency tasks was maintained by French immersion children throughout in spite of schooling being conducted in French.
本研究考察了在沉浸式教育项目中逐渐掌握双语的儿童的元语言意识。目的是确定在新兴双语的哪个阶段会出现先前报道的元语言优势，以及哪些类型的元语言任务能揭示这些发展差异。参与者是124名二、五年级的儿童，他们分别参加了法语沉浸式课程或常规英语课程。所有儿童都来自以英语为母语的单语家庭，就读于社会经济水平中等的社区的当地公立学校。测量指标包括形态意识、句法意识和言语流畅性，所有测试均用英语进行。这些任务对执行控制的需求各不相同，执行控制是一种在双语儿童中得到增强的认知能力。总体而言，早期研究中报道的元语言优势是逐渐显现的，对需要更多执行控制的任务（语法判断）的优势出现得较晚，甚至到五年级时，一些任务虽有改善但仍未超过单语儿童的表现（言语流畅性）。这些发现表明，在大约5年的时间里，与双语相关的元语言概念的变化是逐渐出现的。尽管教学语言是法语，但法语沉浸式课程的儿童在整个过程中都保持了英语语言能力任务的表现。
