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

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Babylon, Centre for Studies of Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000, LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Jeanne Kurvers

  2. Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Helene Uri

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  1. Jeanne Kurvers
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  2. Helene Uri
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Correspondence to Jeanne Kurvers.

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Kurvers, J., Uri, H. Metalexical Awareness: Development, Methodology or Written Language? A Cross-linguistic Comparison. J Psycholinguist Res 35, 353–367 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-006-9019-6

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