Metalinguistic Ability and Cognitive Performance in Children from Five to Seven

Abstract

The purposes of this study were: (1) to determine whether there is a developmental sequence in the child's acquisition of certain metalinguistic abilities; and (2) to determine whether the child's acquisition of these metalinguistic abilities is related to Piagetian operations. The measure of metalinguistic ability on which this study focused was word awareness, or the ability to separate and identify words presented in context. The subjects were 100 children, 50 from a kindergarten and 50 from the first grade of a public school. The children were tested on the Word Awareness Test, three Piagetian seriation tasks, two seriation tasks devised by Almy, a standardized Riddle Interview, a group IQ test, and a reading readiness test (for kindergarten subjects) or reading achievement test (for first grade subjects). Factor analysis and analysis of variance were performed. The findings show a rapid increase in word awareness at about age six, and substantiate the theoretically predicted order of difficulty of the item types (lists, sentences, and homophones). The relationship between the Word Awareness Test and the Piagetian tests of seriation was low. (DB)