Metalinguistic Awareness in Monolingual and Bilingual Mildly Retarded Children

Abstract

There has been much controversy about bilingualism in relation to cognitive and linguistic development in children. There have been suggestions that bilinguals might be slightly advanced in the area of metalinguistic awareness and that this “headstart” would generalize to other cognitive abilities. However, there are no data which address this question with mentally retarded children, who by definition exhibit anomalous cognitive functioning. The present study evaluated the metalinguistic awareness and cognitive functioning of matched groups of bilingual (n = 23) and monolingual (n = 23) mildly retarded students. The results indicated that the bilingual subjects did not outperform the monolingual subjects on a neo-piagetian measure of conservation, although there were differences on the metalinguistic tasks. These results are discussed in relation to current theories of language and cognition in bilingual children.