Metalinguistic Awareness in Bilingual People

Sa？etak The research on bilinguals indicates some bilingual advantages over the matched monolinguals. It is suggested that the exposure to two different language codes influences the brain elasticity and therefore, enhances metalinguistic advantages. Throughout the years, many studies have tried to reveal the relationship between bilingualism and the demonstrated performance on metalinguistic tasks. Similarly, the aim of this study is to provide some insight to the issue of monolingual and bilingual performance on metalinguistic tasks. To evaluate this ability, the participants were asked to complete a web designed survey. The survey was designed based on Ianco-Worrall’s (1972), Bialystok’s (1986b) and Bialystok and Niccols’ (1989) studies on form-judgment tasks, Vygotky’s (1962) and Ricciardelli (1993) experiment on word renaming tasks, Ben-Zeev’s (1977) symbol substitution test and Bialystok’s (1987, 2001) and Ricciardelli’s et al. (1989) grammar judgments tests. The questions from the survey intend to elicit the word or the syntactic awareness of the participants. The results did not demonstrate a complete overlap with the findings suggested by the literature. The general findings approved of the idea that superior metalinguistic abilities are evident in the performance of bilingual participants. However, contrary to the earlier assumptions, in some of the tasks the study identified superior metalinguistic performance demonstrated by the monolingual participant. The implications of these findings suggest that besides the exposure to two different languages, which enhances metalinguistic abilities, other factors might also influence the performance in metalinguistic tasks. Therefore, a future study which underlines a wider variety of crucial factors and a greater number of participants should be conducted to justify the validity of the results gathered from the metalinguistic awareness survey