Subject - specific and task - specific < characteristics of metal i ng u ist ic awareness in bilingual children

The relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness was explored in Puerto Rican Spanishand English-speaking children. All subjects were from low-income backgrounds and were enrolled in a transitional bilingual education program in the United States. Two longitudinal studies were conducted. The first study examined the abilities to note and correct ungrammatical sentences in Spanish. Subjects were 104 children in first and second grade at the beginning of the study. They were followed over a period of 2 years. The second study looked at the ability to detect ambiguity in sentences, and to paraphrase the different meanings. There were 107 subjects who were in fourth and fifth grades, and were also followed over a 2-year period. The results from both studies indicated that native language proficiency as well as the degree of bilingualism affected metalinguistic awareness. The results also indicated that these effects interacted with the types of items in the metalinguistic tasks. This suggests that both subject-specific and task-specific factors are important in understanding the relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness. The goal of this paper is to explore the relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness the ability to attend and reflect upon the properties of language. This relationship has been studied by a number of previous researchers who, for the most part, have hypothesized that bilingualism accelerates the conscious separation of the name from the object to which it refers (Ben-Zeev, 1977a, 1977b; Cummins, 1978; Ianco-Worrall, 1972; Rosenbaum & Pinker, 1983). Although this hypothesis has been supported in some experiments, it has not been in others (see, e.g., Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins 1976; see Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1986, for a review). The discrepancy in these results might be due to differences in the populations studied, such as in their age, level of proficiency in the two languages, and the context of bilingualism. These differences, however, are difficult to assess, given the lack of detailed information about the populations. The concern of our study was two-fold. We wanted to test a hypothesis we believe to be more promising that the bilingual experience, by requiring that the form of the two languages be attended to, enhances the ability to direct attention to the form of language and focus on it effectively. Our hypothesis,