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Published in final edited form as: Riv Psicolinguist Appl. 2012 ; 12(3): 47–56.
Metalinguistic Ability in Bilingual Children: The Role of Executive Control Deanna C. Friesen and Ellen Bialystok York University
Abstract
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Although bilingual children tend to obtain lower scores than their monolingual peers on tests of formal language ability, they exhibit a processing advantage on non-verbal executive control (EC) tasks. This advantage may be attributable to EC practice that bilinguals routinely receive from the constant need to manage attention to two jointly activated languages. Metalinguistic tasks, unlike linguistic tasks, require children to access both their language knowledge (i.e., representations) and recruit EC ability; that is, metalinguistic tasks require children to use attentional processes to operate on linguistic forms. In this article, we review our recent studies examining linguistic and metalinguistic abilities in tasks that differed in the extent to which solutions were based on linguistic knowledge (representations) or control processes, allowing us to examine the relative contribution of each to bilingual language processing. Results indicate that bilinguals’ superior EC ability allows them to compensate for weaker linguistic knowledge in metalinguistic tasks where greater recruitment of control processes is required.
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Research over the past 30 years has consistently found that bilingual children exhibit advantages on metalinguistic tasks relative to their monolingual peers (see Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010, for a review). This large body of research enables us to more precisely delineate the conditions under which a bilingual advantage is observed. By comparing bilingual and monolingual performance, we gain insight into the mechanisms of metalinguistic development and how language experience shapes this development. In this paper, we start by reviewing a theoretical framework for understanding how bilingualism may lead to improved metalinguistic ability. We then evaluate and refine this framework by presenting recent research that uses a variety of linguistic and metalinguistic tasks.
Theoretical Framework The concept “metalinguistic” is not easily defined and is used to qualify notions of awareness, ability or task without distinguishing among them (Bialystok, 2001). Broadly, Pratt and Grieve (1984) characterized metalinguistic awareness “as the ability to think about and reflect upon the nature and functions of language” (p. 2). Gombert (1990) suggested that metalinguistic awareness involve intentionally reflecting on and manipulating language. As a result, language itself becomes an object to think about abstractly (Jessner, 2006). Bialystok (2001) highlighted that metalinguistic awareness necessitates that “attention is
Address for Correspondence: Deanna C. Friesen, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada, [email protected].
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actively focused on … the explicit properties of language” (p. 127). Here we adopt a cognitive framework, originally proposed by Bialystok and Ryan (1985; see also Bialystok, 1986, 1988) that outlines two components of metalinguistic awareness that are central to this definition: executive control and language analysis. Simply put, control may be defined as attention and monitoring processes, whereas linguistic analysis refers to formal language knowledge.
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Based on this framework, for an individual to successfully perform a metalinguistic task (i.e., a task that require attending to and manipulating the form of language, Cummins, 1978), three prerequisites are necessary. In addition to control and language knowledge, children must know that language mappings are arbitrary. That is, they have to recognize that a language’s form, such as the phonological structure of a spoken word, is separate from its meaning. Once children have this fundamental knowledge, executive control is needed to selectively attend to the required linguistic feature, usually form, without being distracted by the meaning. Third, once children are able to focus on the form, they must have sufficient language knowledge to determine the correct answer. Depending on its nature, a metalinguistic task may draw more heavily on either control or language knowledge. In a factor analysis, Ricciardelli (1993) confirmed control and language knowledge are indeed separate components of performance on metalinguistic tasks. Bilingualism impacts each of these three facets of metalinguistic ability (i.e., an individual’s capacity to use knowledge about language, Bialystok, 2001), but in different ways. Specifically, bilingualism benefits understanding the arbitrariness of language and the development of control, but does not necessarily benefit the acquisition of language representations in each language.
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Recognizing the relation between words and their meanings requires understanding the arbitrariness of language. Early research on metalinguistic ability found that bilingual children understand this principle earlier than monolinguals (e.g., Bialystok, 1986, 1997; Cummins, 1978). For example, Bialystok (1997) found that 5-year old bilinguals had a better understanding of the symbolic nature of written language than their monolingual peers. These bilingual children demonstrated more advanced concepts of print by recognizing that a printed label still referred to the same object even if it was “accidently” placed in front of a new object. Monolingual children were more likely to change their answer about what the print said when it accompanied a different picture. Bilingual children also more successfully solve Piaget’s sun/moon problem (Bialystok, 1986; Cummins, 1978; Ianco-Worrall, 1972). In this task, children are asked to acknowledge the arbitrariness of labels by switching the names of known objects, agreeing that if the sun were called the “moon” and the moon were called the “sun”, then the “sun” would be up at night and it would be dark. Bilinguals’ superior performance on these tasks, showing their greater symbolic flexibility, has been attributed to the very nature of bilingualism. Specifically, since bilinguals learn quite early that objects have a label in each of their languages, they experience an accelerated separation of form and meaning, which in turn may focus their attention on the form of language (Cummins, 1978). Likewise, this separation may enable bilinguals to more readily dissociate a referent’s properties from its label (Bialystok, 1997). This fundamental advantage in separating form from meaning contributes to bilingual children’s understanding of the arbitrariness of language reference, the first prerequisite ability for metalinguistic development. Riv Psicolinguist Appl. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 April 27.
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A large body of research has demonstrated that bilingual children have more efficient executive control systems than monolinguals (e.g., Bialystok & Martin, 2004; Bialystok & Shapero, 2005; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008). In particular, bilinguals excel at non-verbal conflict tasks that require them to focus on one dimension of a task and ignore distracting information from another (e.g., Barac & Bialystok, 2012; Bialystok, 2010). This benefit is believed to result from the executive control practice that bilinguals amass by managing their two languages (Bialystok, 2001). It is well established that both languages are jointly activated for bilinguals (Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987; Francis, 1999; Friesen & Jared, 2012; Kroll & DeGroot, 1997; Marian, Spivey, & Hirsch, 2003; Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nosselt, & Munte, 2002) so a mechanism is required to control selection of the target language in spite of competition from the other language. This selection is handled by the executive control system. The increased practice using the executive control network for language selection enables more efficient cognitive processing. Consequently, according to this framework, metalinguistic tasks that favor the recruitment of executive control processes wherein it is more difficult to isolate form from meaning should be performed better by bilingual children than by their monolingual peers.
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In contrast to the increased use of executive control, bilingualism limits individuals’ exposure to each of their languages. That is, bilinguals’ learning opportunities are divided between their languages. As a result, a number of studies have found that bilinguals’ language proficiency in each of their languages is poorer than monolinguals’ language proficiency (e.g., Oller & Eilers, 2002). In a large scale study of approximately 1700 bilingual and monolingual children between the ages of 3- and 10-years old performing a test of English receptive vocabulary, Bialystok, Luk, Peets and Yang (2010) found that both groups scored in the normal range but the scores of the bilingual children were significantly lower than monolingual children at each age. Thus, tasks that favor the recruitment of formal language knowledge may not result in a bilingual advantage.
Task Demands and Individual Characteristics
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Recent work has utilized linguistic and metalinguistic tasks that differ in the degree to which they require linguistic knowledge and executive control for their solution. Such an approach allows us to examine the relative contribution of each component to bilinguals’ metalinguistic ability. Here we focus on three metalinguistic tasks: the Wug test, a grammaticality judgment task and verbal fluency. We also consider how characteristics such as language proficiency and degree of bilingualism interact with task demands for bilingual children. Our framework predicts that bilinguals will excel at tasks that place high demands on executive control but not on tasks that depend on representations of linguistic knowledge. Additionally, when a task enables bilinguals to make use of their superior executive control skills, these skills will offset the costs of weaker language knowledge. The first task reviewed here is the Wug test (Berko, 1958). This test is a classic psycholinguistic measure of English morphological awareness in which children are required to apply English morphological rules to nonsense words. For example, a child is shown a picture of imaginary creatures and told “This is a wug. Here is another wug. How many are there?” This is followed by the prompt “There are two _______”. This is a
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metalinguistic task because children must make explicit their implicit knowledge of English morphology. The executive control demands are low because there is no salient distracting information that must be ignored, but demands on language knowledge are fairly high because children are required to supply the correct morphological form.
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A recent study by Barac and Bialystok (2012) employed the Wug test to assess whether bilinguals exhibit a metalinguistic advantage when language demands were high. Additionally, they assessed the nature of the bilingual experience with respect to the language of education and the relationship between the bilingual’s two languages. To this end, they tested 6-year old bilinguals who were fluent in English and either French, Spanish or Chinese. Both the Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilingual groups were being educated in English whereas the French-English bilingual group was being educated in French. Scores for English vocabulary and grammar knowledge were equivalent for the Spanish-English bilinguals and an English monolingual control group, with lower scores obtained by the other two bilingual groups, but importantly, the Spanish-English bilinguals outperformed the English monolinguals on the Wug test. Comparable performance for the monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals on the linguistic tasks may be attributed to the combined impact of the Spanish-English group’s educational background in English and the greater linguistic overlap between of English and Spanish than between English and Chinese. However, the further advantage in EC in the bilingual group allowed them to outperform the monolinguals (who had similar representational knowledge of English structure) on the metalinguistic test. These results suggest that only when language knowledge is equal does a bilingual advantage emerge on a task that is high in language demands.
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A second question that has been posed is whether becoming more bilingual produces an even greater metalinguistic advantage when English language ability is comparable. Bialystok, Peets and Moreno (in press) assessed Grade 2 and Grade 5 children who were in a French immersion program or in an English program on the Wug test. In French Immersion, Anglophone students receive all of their instruction in French, despite knowing no French upon entry into the program; therefore, they are in the process of becoming bilingual. English is introduced as a subject around Grade 3 (Genesee, 1996). French immersion students typically exhibit equivalent English skills to their monolingual peers (Turnbull, Hart, & Lapkin, 2003), justifying the comparison of children in these two groups on English tasks. Results from Bialystok et al., (in press) confirmed that Immersion and English program students did not differ on their English vocabulary, however, the immersion group did outperform the English program children in both Grade 2 and Grade 5 on the Wug test. Importantly, this effect did not increase as the immersion students gained more bilingual experience from Grade 2 to Grade 5 indicating that more bilingual experience did not amplify the advantage. In a subsequent study, Bialystok and Barac (2012) performed a regression analysis on variables that predicted Wug performance in Hebrew-English bilinguals in Grades 2 and 3. They confirmed that degree of bilingual experience was not a significant predictor, but that English vocabulary knowledge and non-verbal IQ did predict Wug performance. Taken together, when a metalinguistic task has high linguistic demands, bilingualism provides initial insight into the structural relations of a language, but further experience does not provide greater returns (Bialystok & Barac, 2012). Additionally, these Riv Psicolinguist Appl. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 April 27.
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benefits on the Wug test were only observed when bilinguals had sufficient knowledge of the target language.
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Unlike the Wug test, a grammaticality judgment task can be designed to recruit language knowledge and assess representation as well as place high demands on executive control. In our adaptation of the task, participants must judge whether an auditorally presented sentence is grammatically correct, ignoring any information about meaning or semantic integrity. Specifically, children are told “Tell me if the sentence is said the right way, even if the sentence is silly”. Sentence conditions typically consist of grammatically correct sentences (e.g., Apples grow on trees), ungrammatical sentences (e.g., Apples growed on trees) and grammatically correct but semantically anomalous sentences (e.g., Apples grow on noses). The semantically anomalous sentences place high demands on executive control because listeners must ignore the distracting and misleading semantic information to judge that the sentence is grammatically correct. In contrast, the ungrammatical sentences place fewer demands on executive control because there is no conflicting semantic information to ignore. Instead listeners must use their language knowledge to identify the grammatical error. Therefore, the ungrammatical sentences serve as a linguistic task and the semantically anomalous sentences are metalinguistic in nature, relying heavily on executive control. Thus, the prediction is that bilinguals will exhibit an advantage on the semantically anomalous sentences compared to monolingual children but no advantage on the ungrammatical sentences.
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When Bialystok (1986) administered this grammaticality judgment task to children between the ages of 5- and 9-years old, she found that both fully bilingual children and children who were becoming bilingual through an immersion program outperformed their monolingual peers on the semantically anomalous sentences but not the grammatically correct or incorrect sentences. Bialystok attributed bilingual children’s success to their ability to recruit more efficient control mechanisms. A follow-up study provided evidence supporting the premise that the semantically anomalous sentences favour the recruitment of control whereas the ungrammatical sentences rely more heavily on language knowledge. Bialystok (1988) correlated performance on these sentences types with other measures that were believed to reflect control and language proficiency and found that performance on the semantically anomalous sentences correlated with performance on the sun/moon task, whereas performance on the ungrammatical sentences was correlated with vocabulary knowledge. These results further validate the task’s ability to tap into both metalinguistic and linguistic skills. Cromdal (1999) employed the sentence judgment task to investigate the relative contributions of control and language knowledge as a function of language proficiency. Five-year old Swedish-English fully bilingual children outperformed their Swedish monolingual peers on both the ungrammatical and semantically anomalous sentences. In contrast, although partially bilingual children scored numerically higher than the monolingual children they did not differ significantly on the semantically anomalous sentences. Cromdal proposed that the partial bilinguals should have performed worse on the task, but that their superior control ability compensated for weaker language knowledge.
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Another approach to understanding the role of language proficiency in metalinguistic tasks is to compare the performance of bilingual children in their two languages. Because executive control is a general cognitive system it should operate similarly in both of a bilingual’s languages. In contrast, representational knowledge in each language may differ. As a result, conditions where performance differs across languages may be more reflective of linguistic knowledge in each language and conditions that are similar may reflect control. Hermanto, Moreno and Bialystok (in press) asked children in Grade 2 and 5 to perform the grammaticality judgment task in both English and French. These students attended a private French Immersion school that is more intense than public French immersion because French is used both in and out of the classroom. Nonetheless, the children were from Anglophone households and lived in an English-speaking community. For these reasons, the English vocabulary knowledge of these children was significantly stronger than their French vocabulary knowledge. Not surprisingly, therefore, children performed better on the English grammaticality judgment task than they did on the French counterpart. However, the magnitude of the difference was significantly larger for the ungrammatical sentences than for the semantically anomalous sentences. What this suggests is that bilinguals were able to compensate for their weaker language knowledge in French in the condition where control demands were high by relying on their executive control ability. Bialystok et al. (in press) used this grammaticality judgment task to investigate whether these executive control abilities increase as children become more bilingual. They found that French Immersion public school children did not differ from the English program children in Grade 2, but by Grade 5 the Immersion students outperformed the English program students on the semantically anomalous sentences indicating level of executive control. Thus, unlike the Wug test, more bilingual experience resulted in better performance on the sentence type that had high control demands. Taken together, for metalinguistic tasks that require high levels of control, more bilingual experience enables better metalinguistic performance and better control can compensate for weaker language skills.
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The final metalinguistic task discussed here is verbal fluency. This task is a neuropsychological instrument that is typically used to evaluate both language proficiency and integrity of brain functioning (Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001). Participants are asked to generate as many words as possible in 60 seconds that belong either to a semantic category (e.g., animals) or begin with a specific letter (e.g., F). Both tasks require vocabulary knowledge to generate words, but the conditions place different demands on the executive control system. The category fluency task has low control demands because it requires responses that are consistent with the structure of semantic memory. That is, generated words activate semantic associates which may also be appropriate responses; thus, this task primarily depends on vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, the letter fluency task places high demands on both vocabulary knowledge and executive control. Because words are not listed alphabetically in memory, the letter fluency task requires the participant to ignore semantically related words that may be activated and focus on the initial letter. The task also has additional exclusionary criteria such as no morphological variants, proper names or numbers, so more effortful processing and monitoring are required for the letter fluency task than for the category fluency task (Delis et al., 2001).
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Recently, researchers have taken advantage of the differences between these tasks to investigate how bilinguals’ control systems operate can potentially compensate for weaker linguistic skill. Since bilinguals tend to exhibit poorer performance on formal tests of vocabulary (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2010), they should be at a general disadvantage on the verbal fluency task. Indeed, on average bilingual adults generate fewer words than monolinguals in both semantic and category fluency tasks (e.g., Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002; Sandoval, Gollan, Ferreira, & Salmon, 2010). However, when Bialystok, Craik and Luk (2008, study 2) performed a median split of their bilingual adults based on English vocabulary proficiency, they found that bilingual adults with low English proficiency performed worse on the category task (i.e., the linguistic task), but equivalently on the letter fluency task (i.e., the metalinguistic task) relative to their monolingual peers. Likewise, when vocabulary size was controlled for across the whole sample, they found that bilingual adults outperformed monolinguals on the letter fluency task and exhibited comparable performance on the category task. In a follow-up study, Luo, Luk and Bialystok (2010) investigated the time course of lexical retrieval in the verbal fluency task. In addition to replicating Bialystok et al.’s (2008) findings, they observed that the rate of decline in generating responses (i.e., the decrease over the 60 seconds in the number of words produced in each 5 second bin) was less steep for both low and high proficiency bilinguals than for monolinguals. Luo et al. interpreted these findings to indicate that bilinguals were able to employ their superior executive control to better resist the interference generated by semantic competitors, an interference that increases as the task unfolds. This superior executive control ability enabled the high English proficiency bilinguals to outperform the monolinguals and it enabled the low proficiency bilinguals to compensate for weaker English language knowledge and equal the monolinguals’ performance.
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Bilingual and monolingual children show similar patterns of results as those reported for adults. Luo, Luk, Peets and Bialystok (2012) found that despite weaker English vocabulary knowledge, bilingual children in Grade 2 and Grade 5 did not differ from monolingual children on the number of responses generated in the letter fluency task. Importantly, and like the bilingual adults, they were able to generate responses significantly later in the time course than monolingual children, suggesting a benefit of executive control in performing the task. In contrast, Bialystok et al. (in press) found that French immersion students in Grade 2 produced fewer words on the verbal fluency task than did English program children. However, this result may be attributable to the nature of their English education. In Grade 2, Immersion students have yet to have any formal English literacy instruction, so students would understandably have greater difficulty mapping their oral language knowledge onto a specific grapheme, the “cue” in the letter fluency task. Importantly, this gap between immersion children and English program children is closed by Grade 5, indicating that the rate of improvement for immersion children was faster. In comparison, performance on the category fluency task did not differ between groups. When Hermanto et al. (in press) compared verbal fluency across the immersion students’ two languages they again found that performance was better in the English tasks. However, a larger difference between languages was observed in the category fluency task than in the letter fluency task. Thus, just as in the grammaticality judgement task, a smaller difference between languages was observed on the task that requires more executive control. These findings converge on the
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conclusion that bilinguals excel at metalinguistic tasks that enable them to utilize executive control and enable them to compensate for weaker language skill.
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Conclusions
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The recent findings described here are consistent with the general framework of control and language analysis as originally proposed by Bialystok and Ryan (1985). Moreover, the use of tasks that vary on their linguistic and metalinguistic demands enables us to more fully delineate bilingual metalinguistic development. Importantly, whether or not bilinguals exhibited a processing advantage was dependant on both the nature of the task demands and their bilingual experience. In the Wug test which requires a high level of English morphological knowledge but little executive control, a bilingual advantage was only observed when bilinguals had equivalent language proficiency to the monolingual control group (Barac & Bialystok, 2012). There was no additional advantage on the Wug test when individuals becoming bilingual had more dual language exposure (cf., Bialystok et al., in press). This suggests that superior performance on the Wug test was driven by initial increased insight into the relationship between language’s form and its meaning and not by improving control mechanisms. In contrast, in the grammaticality judgment and verbal fluency tasks that required high levels of executive control, our research indicates that superior executive control enables bilinguals to compensate for weaker language skills (Hermanto et al., in press) and greater bilingual experience enables improved control mechanisms (Bialystok et al., in press). Thus, through the lens of bilingualism, these results serve to refine our understanding of how both executive control and language knowledge jointly influence metalinguistic awareness development.
Acknowledgments The research reported in this paper and preparation of the manuscript was funded by grant R01HD052523 from the US National Institutes of Health and by grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to EB.
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Published in final edited form as: Riv Psicolinguist Appl. 2012 ; 12(3): 47–56.
Metalinguistic Ability in Bilingual Children: The Role of Executive Control Deanna C. Friesen and Ellen Bialystok York University
Abstract
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Although bilingual children tend to obtain lower scores than their monolingual peers on tests of formal language ability, they exhibit a processing advantage on non-verbal executive control (EC) tasks. This advantage may be attributable to EC practice that bilinguals routinely receive from the constant need to manage attention to two jointly activated languages. Metalinguistic tasks, unlike linguistic tasks, require children to access both their language knowledge (i.e., representations) and recruit EC ability; that is, metalinguistic tasks require children to use attentional processes to operate on linguistic forms. In this article, we review our recent studies examining linguistic and metalinguistic abilities in tasks that differed in the extent to which solutions were based on linguistic knowledge (representations) or control processes, allowing us to examine the relative contribution of each to bilingual language processing. Results indicate that bilinguals’ superior EC ability allows them to compensate for weaker linguistic knowledge in metalinguistic tasks where greater recruitment of control processes is required.
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Research over the past 30 years has consistently found that bilingual children exhibit advantages on metalinguistic tasks relative to their monolingual peers (see Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010, for a review). This large body of research enables us to more precisely delineate the conditions under which a bilingual advantage is observed. By comparing bilingual and monolingual performance, we gain insight into the mechanisms of metalinguistic development and how language experience shapes this development. In this paper, we start by reviewing a theoretical framework for understanding how bilingualism may lead to improved metalinguistic ability. We then evaluate and refine this framework by presenting recent research that uses a variety of linguistic and metalinguistic tasks.
Theoretical Framework The concept “metalinguistic” is not easily defined and is used to qualify notions of awareness, ability or task without distinguishing among them (Bialystok, 2001). Broadly, Pratt and Grieve (1984) characterized metalinguistic awareness “as the ability to think about and reflect upon the nature and functions of language” (p. 2). Gombert (1990) suggested that metalinguistic awareness involve intentionally reflecting on and manipulating language. As a result, language itself becomes an object to think about abstractly (Jessner, 2006). Bialystok (2001) highlighted that metalinguistic awareness necessitates that “attention is
Address for Correspondence: Deanna C. Friesen, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada, [email protected].
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actively focused on … the explicit properties of language” (p. 127). Here we adopt a cognitive framework, originally proposed by Bialystok and Ryan (1985; see also Bialystok, 1986, 1988) that outlines two components of metalinguistic awareness that are central to this definition: executive control and language analysis. Simply put, control may be defined as attention and monitoring processes, whereas linguistic analysis refers to formal language knowledge.
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Based on this framework, for an individual to successfully perform a metalinguistic task (i.e., a task that require attending to and manipulating the form of language, Cummins, 1978), three prerequisites are necessary. In addition to control and language knowledge, children must know that language mappings are arbitrary. That is, they have to recognize that a language’s form, such as the phonological structure of a spoken word, is separate from its meaning. Once children have this fundamental knowledge, executive control is needed to selectively attend to the required linguistic feature, usually form, without being distracted by the meaning. Third, once children are able to focus on the form, they must have sufficient language knowledge to determine the correct answer. Depending on its nature, a metalinguistic task may draw more heavily on either control or language knowledge. In a factor analysis, Ricciardelli (1993) confirmed control and language knowledge are indeed separate components of performance on metalinguistic tasks. Bilingualism impacts each of these three facets of metalinguistic ability (i.e., an individual’s capacity to use knowledge about language, Bialystok, 2001), but in different ways. Specifically, bilingualism benefits understanding the arbitrariness of language and the development of control, but does not necessarily benefit the acquisition of language representations in each language.
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Recognizing the relation between words and their meanings requires understanding the arbitrariness of language. Early research on metalinguistic ability found that bilingual children understand this principle earlier than monolinguals (e.g., Bialystok, 1986, 1997; Cummins, 1978). For example, Bialystok (1997) found that 5-year old bilinguals had a better understanding of the symbolic nature of written language than their monolingual peers. These bilingual children demonstrated more advanced concepts of print by recognizing that a printed label still referred to the same object even if it was “accidently” placed in front of a new object. Monolingual children were more likely to change their answer about what the print said when it accompanied a different picture. Bilingual children also more successfully solve Piaget’s sun/moon problem (Bialystok, 1986; Cummins, 1978; Ianco-Worrall, 1972). In this task, children are asked to acknowledge the arbitrariness of labels by switching the names of known objects, agreeing that if the sun were called the “moon” and the moon were called the “sun”, then the “sun” would be up at night and it would be dark. Bilinguals’ superior performance on these tasks, showing their greater symbolic flexibility, has been attributed to the very nature of bilingualism. Specifically, since bilinguals learn quite early that objects have a label in each of their languages, they experience an accelerated separation of form and meaning, which in turn may focus their attention on the form of language (Cummins, 1978). Likewise, this separation may enable bilinguals to more readily dissociate a referent’s properties from its label (Bialystok, 1997). This fundamental advantage in separating form from meaning contributes to bilingual children’s understanding of the arbitrariness of language reference, the first prerequisite ability for metalinguistic development. Riv Psicolinguist Appl. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 April 27.
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A large body of research has demonstrated that bilingual children have more efficient executive control systems than monolinguals (e.g., Bialystok & Martin, 2004; Bialystok & Shapero, 2005; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008). In particular, bilinguals excel at non-verbal conflict tasks that require them to focus on one dimension of a task and ignore distracting information from another (e.g., Barac & Bialystok, 2012; Bialystok, 2010). This benefit is believed to result from the executive control practice that bilinguals amass by managing their two languages (Bialystok, 2001). It is well established that both languages are jointly activated for bilinguals (Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987; Francis, 1999; Friesen & Jared, 2012; Kroll & DeGroot, 1997; Marian, Spivey, & Hirsch, 2003; Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nosselt, & Munte, 2002) so a mechanism is required to control selection of the target language in spite of competition from the other language. This selection is handled by the executive control system. The increased practice using the executive control network for language selection enables more efficient cognitive processing. Consequently, according to this framework, metalinguistic tasks that favor the recruitment of executive control processes wherein it is more difficult to isolate form from meaning should be performed better by bilingual children than by their monolingual peers.
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In contrast to the increased use of executive control, bilingualism limits individuals’ exposure to each of their languages. That is, bilinguals’ learning opportunities are divided between their languages. As a result, a number of studies have found that bilinguals’ language proficiency in each of their languages is poorer than monolinguals’ language proficiency (e.g., Oller & Eilers, 2002). In a large scale study of approximately 1700 bilingual and monolingual children between the ages of 3- and 10-years old performing a test of English receptive vocabulary, Bialystok, Luk, Peets and Yang (2010) found that both groups scored in the normal range but the scores of the bilingual children were significantly lower than monolingual children at each age. Thus, tasks that favor the recruitment of formal language knowledge may not result in a bilingual advantage.
Task Demands and Individual Characteristics
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Recent work has utilized linguistic and metalinguistic tasks that differ in the degree to which they require linguistic knowledge and executive control for their solution. Such an approach allows us to examine the relative contribution of each component to bilinguals’ metalinguistic ability. Here we focus on three metalinguistic tasks: the Wug test, a grammaticality judgment task and verbal fluency. We also consider how characteristics such as language proficiency and degree of bilingualism interact with task demands for bilingual children. Our framework predicts that bilinguals will excel at tasks that place high demands on executive control but not on tasks that depend on representations of linguistic knowledge. Additionally, when a task enables bilinguals to make use of their superior executive control skills, these skills will offset the costs of weaker language knowledge. The first task reviewed here is the Wug test (Berko, 1958). This test is a classic psycholinguistic measure of English morphological awareness in which children are required to apply English morphological rules to nonsense words. For example, a child is shown a picture of imaginary creatures and told “This is a wug. Here is another wug. How many are there?” This is followed by the prompt “There are two _______”. This is a
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metalinguistic task because children must make explicit their implicit knowledge of English morphology. The executive control demands are low because there is no salient distracting information that must be ignored, but demands on language knowledge are fairly high because children are required to supply the correct morphological form.
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A recent study by Barac and Bialystok (2012) employed the Wug test to assess whether bilinguals exhibit a metalinguistic advantage when language demands were high. Additionally, they assessed the nature of the bilingual experience with respect to the language of education and the relationship between the bilingual’s two languages. To this end, they tested 6-year old bilinguals who were fluent in English and either French, Spanish or Chinese. Both the Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilingual groups were being educated in English whereas the French-English bilingual group was being educated in French. Scores for English vocabulary and grammar knowledge were equivalent for the Spanish-English bilinguals and an English monolingual control group, with lower scores obtained by the other two bilingual groups, but importantly, the Spanish-English bilinguals outperformed the English monolinguals on the Wug test. Comparable performance for the monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals on the linguistic tasks may be attributed to the combined impact of the Spanish-English group’s educational background in English and the greater linguistic overlap between of English and Spanish than between English and Chinese. However, the further advantage in EC in the bilingual group allowed them to outperform the monolinguals (who had similar representational knowledge of English structure) on the metalinguistic test. These results suggest that only when language knowledge is equal does a bilingual advantage emerge on a task that is high in language demands.
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A second question that has been posed is whether becoming more bilingual produces an even greater metalinguistic advantage when English language ability is comparable. Bialystok, Peets and Moreno (in press) assessed Grade 2 and Grade 5 children who were in a French immersion program or in an English program on the Wug test. In French Immersion, Anglophone students receive all of their instruction in French, despite knowing no French upon entry into the program; therefore, they are in the process of becoming bilingual. English is introduced as a subject around Grade 3 (Genesee, 1996). French immersion students typically exhibit equivalent English skills to their monolingual peers (Turnbull, Hart, & Lapkin, 2003), justifying the comparison of children in these two groups on English tasks. Results from Bialystok et al., (in press) confirmed that Immersion and English program students did not differ on their English vocabulary, however, the immersion group did outperform the English program children in both Grade 2 and Grade 5 on the Wug test. Importantly, this effect did not increase as the immersion students gained more bilingual experience from Grade 2 to Grade 5 indicating that more bilingual experience did not amplify the advantage. In a subsequent study, Bialystok and Barac (2012) performed a regression analysis on variables that predicted Wug performance in Hebrew-English bilinguals in Grades 2 and 3. They confirmed that degree of bilingual experience was not a significant predictor, but that English vocabulary knowledge and non-verbal IQ did predict Wug performance. Taken together, when a metalinguistic task has high linguistic demands, bilingualism provides initial insight into the structural relations of a language, but further experience does not provide greater returns (Bialystok & Barac, 2012). Additionally, these Riv Psicolinguist Appl. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 April 27.
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benefits on the Wug test were only observed when bilinguals had sufficient knowledge of the target language.
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Unlike the Wug test, a grammaticality judgment task can be designed to recruit language knowledge and assess representation as well as place high demands on executive control. In our adaptation of the task, participants must judge whether an auditorally presented sentence is grammatically correct, ignoring any information about meaning or semantic integrity. Specifically, children are told “Tell me if the sentence is said the right way, even if the sentence is silly”. Sentence conditions typically consist of grammatically correct sentences (e.g., Apples grow on trees), ungrammatical sentences (e.g., Apples growed on trees) and grammatically correct but semantically anomalous sentences (e.g., Apples grow on noses). The semantically anomalous sentences place high demands on executive control because listeners must ignore the distracting and misleading semantic information to judge that the sentence is grammatically correct. In contrast, the ungrammatical sentences place fewer demands on executive control because there is no conflicting semantic information to ignore. Instead listeners must use their language knowledge to identify the grammatical error. Therefore, the ungrammatical sentences serve as a linguistic task and the semantically anomalous sentences are metalinguistic in nature, relying heavily on executive control. Thus, the prediction is that bilinguals will exhibit an advantage on the semantically anomalous sentences compared to monolingual children but no advantage on the ungrammatical sentences.
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When Bialystok (1986) administered this grammaticality judgment task to children between the ages of 5- and 9-years old, she found that both fully bilingual children and children who were becoming bilingual through an immersion program outperformed their monolingual peers on the semantically anomalous sentences but not the grammatically correct or incorrect sentences. Bialystok attributed bilingual children’s success to their ability to recruit more efficient control mechanisms. A follow-up study provided evidence supporting the premise that the semantically anomalous sentences favour the recruitment of control whereas the ungrammatical sentences rely more heavily on language knowledge. Bialystok (1988) correlated performance on these sentences types with other measures that were believed to reflect control and language proficiency and found that performance on the semantically anomalous sentences correlated with performance on the sun/moon task, whereas performance on the ungrammatical sentences was correlated with vocabulary knowledge. These results further validate the task’s ability to tap into both metalinguistic and linguistic skills. Cromdal (1999) employed the sentence judgment task to investigate the relative contributions of control and language knowledge as a function of language proficiency. Five-year old Swedish-English fully bilingual children outperformed their Swedish monolingual peers on both the ungrammatical and semantically anomalous sentences. In contrast, although partially bilingual children scored numerically higher than the monolingual children they did not differ significantly on the semantically anomalous sentences. Cromdal proposed that the partial bilinguals should have performed worse on the task, but that their superior control ability compensated for weaker language knowledge.
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Another approach to understanding the role of language proficiency in metalinguistic tasks is to compare the performance of bilingual children in their two languages. Because executive control is a general cognitive system it should operate similarly in both of a bilingual’s languages. In contrast, representational knowledge in each language may differ. As a result, conditions where performance differs across languages may be more reflective of linguistic knowledge in each language and conditions that are similar may reflect control. Hermanto, Moreno and Bialystok (in press) asked children in Grade 2 and 5 to perform the grammaticality judgment task in both English and French. These students attended a private French Immersion school that is more intense than public French immersion because French is used both in and out of the classroom. Nonetheless, the children were from Anglophone households and lived in an English-speaking community. For these reasons, the English vocabulary knowledge of these children was significantly stronger than their French vocabulary knowledge. Not surprisingly, therefore, children performed better on the English grammaticality judgment task than they did on the French counterpart. However, the magnitude of the difference was significantly larger for the ungrammatical sentences than for the semantically anomalous sentences. What this suggests is that bilinguals were able to compensate for their weaker language knowledge in French in the condition where control demands were high by relying on their executive control ability. Bialystok et al. (in press) used this grammaticality judgment task to investigate whether these executive control abilities increase as children become more bilingual. They found that French Immersion public school children did not differ from the English program children in Grade 2, but by Grade 5 the Immersion students outperformed the English program students on the semantically anomalous sentences indicating level of executive control. Thus, unlike the Wug test, more bilingual experience resulted in better performance on the sentence type that had high control demands. Taken together, for metalinguistic tasks that require high levels of control, more bilingual experience enables better metalinguistic performance and better control can compensate for weaker language skills.
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The final metalinguistic task discussed here is verbal fluency. This task is a neuropsychological instrument that is typically used to evaluate both language proficiency and integrity of brain functioning (Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001). Participants are asked to generate as many words as possible in 60 seconds that belong either to a semantic category (e.g., animals) or begin with a specific letter (e.g., F). Both tasks require vocabulary knowledge to generate words, but the conditions place different demands on the executive control system. The category fluency task has low control demands because it requires responses that are consistent with the structure of semantic memory. That is, generated words activate semantic associates which may also be appropriate responses; thus, this task primarily depends on vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, the letter fluency task places high demands on both vocabulary knowledge and executive control. Because words are not listed alphabetically in memory, the letter fluency task requires the participant to ignore semantically related words that may be activated and focus on the initial letter. The task also has additional exclusionary criteria such as no morphological variants, proper names or numbers, so more effortful processing and monitoring are required for the letter fluency task than for the category fluency task (Delis et al., 2001).
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Recently, researchers have taken advantage of the differences between these tasks to investigate how bilinguals’ control systems operate can potentially compensate for weaker linguistic skill. Since bilinguals tend to exhibit poorer performance on formal tests of vocabulary (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2010), they should be at a general disadvantage on the verbal fluency task. Indeed, on average bilingual adults generate fewer words than monolinguals in both semantic and category fluency tasks (e.g., Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002; Sandoval, Gollan, Ferreira, & Salmon, 2010). However, when Bialystok, Craik and Luk (2008, study 2) performed a median split of their bilingual adults based on English vocabulary proficiency, they found that bilingual adults with low English proficiency performed worse on the category task (i.e., the linguistic task), but equivalently on the letter fluency task (i.e., the metalinguistic task) relative to their monolingual peers. Likewise, when vocabulary size was controlled for across the whole sample, they found that bilingual adults outperformed monolinguals on the letter fluency task and exhibited comparable performance on the category task. In a follow-up study, Luo, Luk and Bialystok (2010) investigated the time course of lexical retrieval in the verbal fluency task. In addition to replicating Bialystok et al.’s (2008) findings, they observed that the rate of decline in generating responses (i.e., the decrease over the 60 seconds in the number of words produced in each 5 second bin) was less steep for both low and high proficiency bilinguals than for monolinguals. Luo et al. interpreted these findings to indicate that bilinguals were able to employ their superior executive control to better resist the interference generated by semantic competitors, an interference that increases as the task unfolds. This superior executive control ability enabled the high English proficiency bilinguals to outperform the monolinguals and it enabled the low proficiency bilinguals to compensate for weaker English language knowledge and equal the monolinguals’ performance.
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Bilingual and monolingual children show similar patterns of results as those reported for adults. Luo, Luk, Peets and Bialystok (2012) found that despite weaker English vocabulary knowledge, bilingual children in Grade 2 and Grade 5 did not differ from monolingual children on the number of responses generated in the letter fluency task. Importantly, and like the bilingual adults, they were able to generate responses significantly later in the time course than monolingual children, suggesting a benefit of executive control in performing the task. In contrast, Bialystok et al. (in press) found that French immersion students in Grade 2 produced fewer words on the verbal fluency task than did English program children. However, this result may be attributable to the nature of their English education. In Grade 2, Immersion students have yet to have any formal English literacy instruction, so students would understandably have greater difficulty mapping their oral language knowledge onto a specific grapheme, the “cue” in the letter fluency task. Importantly, this gap between immersion children and English program children is closed by Grade 5, indicating that the rate of improvement for immersion children was faster. In comparison, performance on the category fluency task did not differ between groups. When Hermanto et al. (in press) compared verbal fluency across the immersion students’ two languages they again found that performance was better in the English tasks. However, a larger difference between languages was observed in the category fluency task than in the letter fluency task. Thus, just as in the grammaticality judgement task, a smaller difference between languages was observed on the task that requires more executive control. These findings converge on the
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conclusion that bilinguals excel at metalinguistic tasks that enable them to utilize executive control and enable them to compensate for weaker language skill.
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Conclusions
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The recent findings described here are consistent with the general framework of control and language analysis as originally proposed by Bialystok and Ryan (1985). Moreover, the use of tasks that vary on their linguistic and metalinguistic demands enables us to more fully delineate bilingual metalinguistic development. Importantly, whether or not bilinguals exhibited a processing advantage was dependant on both the nature of the task demands and their bilingual experience. In the Wug test which requires a high level of English morphological knowledge but little executive control, a bilingual advantage was only observed when bilinguals had equivalent language proficiency to the monolingual control group (Barac & Bialystok, 2012). There was no additional advantage on the Wug test when individuals becoming bilingual had more dual language exposure (cf., Bialystok et al., in press). This suggests that superior performance on the Wug test was driven by initial increased insight into the relationship between language’s form and its meaning and not by improving control mechanisms. In contrast, in the grammaticality judgment and verbal fluency tasks that required high levels of executive control, our research indicates that superior executive control enables bilinguals to compensate for weaker language skills (Hermanto et al., in press) and greater bilingual experience enables improved control mechanisms (Bialystok et al., in press). Thus, through the lens of bilingualism, these results serve to refine our understanding of how both executive control and language knowledge jointly influence metalinguistic awareness development.
Acknowledgments The research reported in this paper and preparation of the manuscript was funded by grant R01HD052523 from the US National Institutes of Health and by grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to EB.
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