Long-term effects of early bilingualism on metalinguistic awareness: a study on young adults.

Effects of early bilingualism on metalinguistic awareness have been studied mainly during childhood, in most cases showing more elaborated capabilities in bilinguals than in monolinguals. Since this influence seems to affect the very processing of language (Bialystok 2001, 2005), one may wonder if this metalinguistic advantage persists at the adult age, when education provides explicit metalinguistic knowledge in L1 and other experiences may also promote a reflective attitude toward language. For testing this hypothesis a sample of 40 adults was recruited, 20-30 years-old, from middle class background, involved in intellectual professions or still university students. Twenty were Italian-French bilinguals, 10 simultaneous,10 early consecutive; 20 were monolinguals, 10 Italian-speaking and 10 French-speaking. They were administered the Raven’s PM38 (Raven, Raven, Court 2003) for assessing nonverbal intelligence, the TAM-3 (Pinto, Iliceto 2007), an Italian version of a test of metalinguistic awareness for adults, and the THAM-3, the French version of the same test for the French-speaking group. Bilinguals were superior in all measures, but with much stronger differences in metalinguistic than in nonverbal intelligence scores; no differences were found between simultaneous and consecutive bilinguals nor between Italian-speaking and French-speaking monolinguals, irrespective of the language of the metalinguistic test administered.