Metalexical Awareness: Development, Methodology or Written Language? A Cross-linguistic Comparison

Abstract

This study explores the ability to access word boundaries of pre-school children, using an on-line methodology (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cockle (1996). Cognition, 58, 197-219.), which has hardly been used outside English-speaking countries. In a cross-linguistic study in the Netherlands and Norway, four and five-year-old children were asked to repeat the last word every time a narrator stopped reading a story. In total 32 target-words were used, both closed and open class words, and both monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The outcomes in both countries were different from those of the original English study (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1996): four- and five-year-olds were successful in only about 26% of the cases, whereas the success rate in the former English experiment was 75% for the younger and 96% for the older children. No differences were found between age groups and between open and closed class words. This methodology does reveal the ability to access word boundaries, but probably not because of the ease of the on-line methodology in itself, but rather because literacy introduces new representations of language, even in on-line processing. The outcomes implicate that the ability to mark word boundaries does not seem to be a valid indication of who is ready for reading.

Reading between the words: The effect of literacy on second language lexical segmentation

“…However, it is unclear whether this is the effect of age or of literacy, because literate children are typically older than preliterate ones (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cuckle, 1996). A recurrent finding in adults is that illiterate adults have more difficulty than literate adults segmenting utterances into word units, supporting the suggestion that literacy plays a role independent of that of age in the development of lexical segmentation (Gombert, 1994; Kurvers, 2015; Kurvers & Uri, 2006; Kurvers et al, 2009; Veldhuis & Kurvers, 2012). However, there are many challenges involved in comparing literate and illiterate adults and in assessing language processing in illiterate populations, which make it hard to isolate the effect of literacy on lexical segmentation.…”

Literate and preliterate children show different learning patterns in an artificial language learning task

“…The fact that the vocabulary advantage continues to develop into adulthood may stem from a plurality of factors, including the development of memory abilities (Gupta and MacWhinney 1997), adults' superior ability to focus attention on parts of the utterance and ignore others (Ramscar and Gitcho 2007;Thompson-Schill et al 2009), or their metalinguistic awareness (e.g. Kurvers and Uri 2006;Ravid and Malenky 2001). As children develop metalinguistic skills and start to consciously reflect on their L1, they may become more attuned to patterns and linguistic entities in their L2 or in an artificial language.…”

The Role of Multiword Building Blocks in Explaining L1–L2 Differences

“…Their input in itself contains longer sentences and is less repetitive than that of infants (Fisher & Tokura, 1996). Another factor that may lead adults to segment the input into individual words is literacy, which has been found to impacts speakers' awareness of words and decrease the tendency to segment speech into MWUs (Kurvers & Uri, 2006).…”