Orthographic control in relation to metalinguistic awareness: Studies in three different French-speaking contexts

This study explores the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and orthographic control. A previous study on a French-speaking sample in Niamey (Niger) revealed an inverse correlation between the metalinguistic scores at an Acceptability task and the number of orthographic errors in the responses to that task. The authors put forward that orthographic control involves an implicit control over the relationship between the orthographic form of words and their meaning, which can be ascribed to an intuitive, ‘epilinguistic’ form of language awareness. The same design was then replicated with two more samples of French-speaking preadolescents of the same age range (11-14), one in Toulouse (France) and the other in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). Considering the three samples together, the current study aimed at verifying: (a) whether the metalinguistic and orthographic performance varied as a function of geographical and sociolinguistic specificities; (b) to what extent the inverse correlations between orthographic errors and metalinguistic performance were confirmed on a broader sample. The results showed that the participants in Abidjan outperformed their peers in Niamey and Toulouse on both metalinguistic awareness and orthographic control grounds. The inverse correlation between metalinguistic performance and orthographic errors was fully confirmed on the whole sample