John Benjamins Publishing Company
Metalinguistic skills of children
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Helen Cairns
Abstract
This chapter addresses the metalinguistic skills of children from three perspectives. (1) The use of children’s ability to make judgments of grammaticality and reference to test hypotheses about their grammatical knowledge. (2) The development of children’s metalinguistic skills in middle childhood. (3) The fact that some metalinguistic skills are associated with early reading ability. It is proposed that metalinguistic skills such as ambiguity detection engage psycholinguistic processing abilities that are crucial for reading success. It is suggested that tests and training of metalinguistic skills involving lexical retrieval and creation of syntactic structure can be used as part of reading readiness programs and remedial reading curricula. Keywords: Metalinguistic skills; linguistic competence; linguistic performance; reading; lexical retrieval; sentence structure
Abstract
This chapter addresses the metalinguistic skills of children from three perspectives. (1) The use of children’s ability to make judgments of grammaticality and reference to test hypotheses about their grammatical knowledge. (2) The development of children’s metalinguistic skills in middle childhood. (3) The fact that some metalinguistic skills are associated with early reading ability. It is proposed that metalinguistic skills such as ambiguity detection engage psycholinguistic processing abilities that are crucial for reading success. It is suggested that tests and training of metalinguistic skills involving lexical retrieval and creation of syntactic structure can be used as part of reading readiness programs and remedial reading curricula. Keywords: Metalinguistic skills; linguistic competence; linguistic performance; reading; lexical retrieval; sentence structure
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
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Part I. Argument structure and clause-internal syntax in children
- Animacy, argument structure and unaccusatives in child English 13
- Remarks on theoretical accounts of Japanese children’s passive acquisition 35
- Early or late acquisition of inflected infinitives in European Portuguese? 65
- The relationship between determiner omission and root infinitives in child English 89
- The semantics of the tense deficit in child Spanish SLI 107
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Part II. The DP domain
- The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns by Faroese children 131
- Pronouns vs. definite descriptions 157
- An L2 study on the production of stress patterns in English compounds 185
- The syntactic domain of content 205
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Part III. Learning theory
- There-insertion 251
- Metalinguistic skills of children 271
- Children’s Grammatical Conservatism 291
- Contributing to linguistic theory, language description and the characterization of language development through experimental studies 309
- A new theory of null-subjects of finite verbs in young children 325
- Index 357
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Argument structure and clause-internal syntax in children
- Animacy, argument structure and unaccusatives in child English 13
- Remarks on theoretical accounts of Japanese children’s passive acquisition 35
- Early or late acquisition of inflected infinitives in European Portuguese? 65
- The relationship between determiner omission and root infinitives in child English 89
- The semantics of the tense deficit in child Spanish SLI 107
-
Part II. The DP domain
- The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns by Faroese children 131
- Pronouns vs. definite descriptions 157
- An L2 study on the production of stress patterns in English compounds 185
- The syntactic domain of content 205
-
Part III. Learning theory
- There-insertion 251
- Metalinguistic skills of children 271
- Children’s Grammatical Conservatism 291
- Contributing to linguistic theory, language description and the characterization of language development through experimental studies 309
- A new theory of null-subjects of finite verbs in young children 325
- Index 357
