Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to compare metalinguistic skills (word awareness and phonological awareness) of a Turkish English sequential bilingual child and a monolingual Turkish child. The participants were two 8-year-old second grade students. Performances of the two participants compared on a set of three tasks related with word awareness and three tasks related with phonological awareness. The results for the word awareness tasks concluded that Turkish English bilingual child outperformed the Turkish monolingual child in the word segmentation task and the symbol substitution task but they both performed equally well in the word definition task. The results for the phonological tasks including the rhyming task, the final phoneme deletion task and phoneme blending tasks revealed no bilingual advantage. The results were discussed in terms of a limit on the effect that bilingualism exerts on metalinguistic development.

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