Metalinguistic awareness and language development

Thirty-six 3- and 4-year-old children were given a battery of six metalinguistic tasks and two measures of language development: the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and a sentence comprehension test. The results clearly showed that the majority of preschoolers were able to make at least some metalinguistic judgments, and that metalinguistic performance improved with age. Furthermore, overall performance on the metalinguistic tasks was significantly correlated with each language measure when the effects of age were partialed out. In contrast, the correlation between age and metalinguistic performance was not significant once the effects of both language measures were partialed out. These data demonstrate that preschoolers' metalinguistic abilities are more extensive than has been previously acknowledged, and that they are closely tied to other aspects of language development at this time.