Ellen Bialystok|Kathleen F. Peets|Sylvain Moreno
Producing bilinguals through immersion education: Development of metalinguistic awareness
York University|Toronto Metropolitan University|Baycrest Hospital
study examined metalinguistic awareness children becoming bilingual immersion education program purpose determine point emerging bilingualism previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear types metalinguistic tasks reveal developmental differences participants 124 children second fifth grades enrolled either french immersion regular english program children monolingual englishspeaking homes attended local public schools middle socioeconomic neighborhoods measures included morphological awareness syntactic awareness verbal fluency testing english tasks differed need executive control cognitive ability enhanced bilingual children overall metalinguistic advantages reported earlier research emerged gradually advantages tasks requiring executive control grammaticality judgment appearing later tasks improving exceeding performance monolinguals verbal fluency even fifth grade findings demonstrate gradual emergence changes metalinguistic concepts associated bilingualism period 5 years performance englishlanguage proficiency tasks maintained french immersion children throughout spite schooling conducted french