Early Multilingualism and Language Awareness

Abstract

This contribution concerns early language awareness in young children under 6 years of age who have been exposed to more than one spoken language and who have not yet received any formal literacy instruction. Multilingual exposure may have taken place from birth, or children may first have heard a single language to which another language was added after some time. The review concerns children whose multilingual proficiency includes well-developed comprehension skills in two languages (relevant studies concerning trilingual children are scarce). Language awareness is here defined as the totality of metacognitive skills needed to allow reflecting on language as an object and the monitoring of one’s own language use and that of others. Characteristic for bilinguals is that in addition to reflection on aspects that monolinguals may also be aware of, e.g., the phonemic make up of a word in one particular (TOM) development and other aspects of their sociocognitive development that may relate to language awareness. language, specifically bilingual aspects of language use may be reflected on or monitored. Behaviors showing language awareness reviewed here include children’s requests for translations, spontaneous or prompted translations, sound play, performance on tasks designed to test children’s phonological awareness (PA) and their ability for morphosyntactic error detection, showing a realization that people may understand two languages, discussing languages and who uses them, language choice patterns, repairing one’s language choice or other aspects of one’s own language use, and corrections of other people’s language usage. The review concludes with a brief discussion of bilingual children’s theory of mind