Melogno Sergio, Pinto Maria Antonietta, Lauriola Marco
Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, "Sapienza" University of Rome, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Faculty of Psychology, "Niccolò Cusano" Telematic University of Rome, Via Don Carlo Gnocchi, 3, 00166 Rome, Italy.
Children (Basel). 2022 Apr 13;9(4):550. doi: 10.3390/children9040550.
The object of this study is the development of metalinguistic abilities in an age range-5 to 7 years-where an important turn takes place in education, namely the transition between kindergarten and primary school. Based on the literature starting from the 70's of the last century, embryonic forms of awareness of how language variation can be manipulated to convey variation in meaning are widely attested in preschoolers. These forms, however, denote an intuitive and implicit level of awareness and will attain a "meta-level", based on more systematic and explicit reflectiveness, later in development in correlation with cognitive, linguistic, and educational factors. To measure the development of these abilities across the above age range, we recruited 160 native Italian-speaking children from 5 to 7, with comparable numerosity at each age, gender balance, average socio-cultural background, and no cognitive nor neuropsychological impairment. We used 6 metalinguistic tasks, the Raven's CPM, a lexical and grammatical ability tests. The results showed a significant increase in all the measures across the span considered and correlations between all the measures. A factor analysis on the metalinguistic tasks showed that a single factor accounted for a large part of the common variance.
本研究的对象是5至7岁年龄段元语言能力的发展，这一年龄段在教育中发生了重要转变，即从幼儿园到小学的过渡。根据上世纪70年代以来的文献，学龄前儿童中广泛证实了对如何操纵语言变异以传达意义变异的初步认知形式。然而，这些形式表示的是一种直观和隐含的认知水平，在与认知、语言和教育因素相关的后期发展中，将基于更系统和明确的反思达到“元水平”。为了测量上述年龄段这些能力的发展情况，我们招募了160名5至7岁以意大利语为母语的儿童，每个年龄段人数相当，性别均衡，社会文化背景平均，且无认知或神经心理障碍。我们使用了6项元语言任务、瑞文标准渐进矩阵测验、一项词汇和语法能力测试。结果显示，在所考虑的年龄段内，所有测量指标均显著增加，且所有测量指标之间存在相关性。对元语言任务的因素分析表明，一个单一因素占共同方差的很大一部分。
