Habilidades de paráfrasis en alumnos bilingües español-italiano entre 14 y 17 años. Un estudio comparatívo entre Argentina e Italia.

This research explores some paraphrasing abilities in Spanish-Italian bilingual stu- dents. The main objectives were: a) to study the developmental trend of these abilities in both the languages of the students, in the age range 14-17, when the school curriculum intensifies its demands in text comprehension in every subject area; b) to check the role of the best known language, Spanish in this case, as the native language, versus the less known, Italian in this case, as a language learnt at school from kindergarten onwards; c) to check the possible correlations between the metalinguistic processes involved in paraphrasing tasks and the non verbal cognitive processes involved in the Raven Progressive Matrices PM38. Results show a statistically significant and linear increase of the performances in the paraphrasing tasks throughout the 3 school levels, and in a parallel way in both languages, although Spanish performances are significantly better than in Italian, as expected. Correlations were also found to be significant, supporting the idea of a metacognitive component in paraphrasing abilities.