Interlinguistic contacts and metalinguistic awareness. Studies with children and preadolescents in Italian contexts

A long tradition of empirical and theoretical studies on early bilingualism has viewed the bilingual experience as something that profoundly affects the cognitive and psycholinguistic processing of the individual, and fosters his/her metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok, 2005, 2008). However, systematic interlinguistic contacts different from those occurring between two languages in classical bilingual development may yield similar favorable effects on metalinguistic awareness. In the present contribution, we will present studies conducted on children who were exposed to linguistically rich experiences in Italy. These include children with productive and receptive skills in the local vernacular in addition to productive and receptive skills in Italian; children enrolled in the standard Italian curriculum that offered courses of the local heritage language; other children enrolled in the standard Italian curriculum that offered courses of Latin or Esperanto, or particularly intensive courses of foreign languages. The results are discussed in light of the common features of these experiences and their educational implications for language teachers