Primo sviluppo metalinguistico in bambini bilingui italiano-inglese. Una ricerca in contesto britannico

This article presents research into metalinguistic development in Italian-English pre- schoolers. A total sample of 118 children was selected, aged 4 to 5,11 years, all living in London and subdivided into two sub-samples. The bilingual sub-sample was composed of 64 children from Italian families, balanced bilinguals from birth and attending an Italian kindergarten, while the monolingual sub-sample was made up of 54 English-speaking children attending an English kindergarten. Half of the bilinguals, randomly selected, was tested through the Italian version of a battery of metalinguistic tasks, the TAM-1 (Pinto, Candilera 2000), while the other half was tested through the English version of the same test, the MAT-1 (Pinto, Titone, Trusso 1999), as were also the English-speaking monolinguals. Results, obtained by means of a 3 factor Anova (type of language experience, age, gender) show a statistically significant effect of biligualism, but at different levels.