Literacy and metalinguistic awareness, a cross-cultural study

grantor: University of TorontoThis dissertation examines the role of literacy in children's acquisition of metalinguistic awareness. It is argued that writing provides children with a set of linguistic categories that are used to reflect on spoken language. Two implications of this hypothesis are: (1) children's understanding of certain metalinguistic concepts will be mediated by their understanding of these concepts as units of text, and (2) children from cultures with qualitatively different scripts will demonstrate corresponding differences in their acquisition of metalinguistic awareness. These claims were investigated in two studies. In the first study, children's (aged 4 to 6 years) understanding of "word" as a piece of written text was found to predict their awareness of "word" as a unit of speech. In the second study, English-speaking Canadian and Mandarin-speaking Chinese children's understanding of the metalinguistic concepts of word (the most salient feature of English script) and character/syllable (the most salient feature of Chinese script) was investigated. It was hypothesized that children would first be aware of the linguistic concept which is most salient in their culture's writing system. Children (aged 4 to 6 years) from both countries were given a speech-based set of tasks that asked them to segment spoken language into (i) words and (ii) syllables/characters, and a text-based set of tasks that asked them to identify (i) words and (ii) syllables/characters in writing. All children received all four sets of tasks (i.e., text-word, text-syllable/character, speech-word, and speech-syllable/character). The results indicated that children were significantly more aware of the linguistic concept that is represented in their culture's writing system. Furthermore, in both countries, children's ability to segment speech was significantly correlated with their understanding of text. One cultural difference, however, was that while none of the English-speaking children demonstrated an awareness of word in speech without knowing words as units of text, some of the Mandarin-speaking children demonstrated an awareness of characters in speech without being able to identify characters in text. The results are discussed in terms of a proposed multi-factor model of metalinguistic awareness in which language acquisition, cognitive development (particularly cognitive control), and literacy uniquely contribute to children's abilities to think about language.Ph.D