Rethinking metalinguistic awareness: representing and accessing knowledge about what counts as a word

Developmentalists have argued that young children have a confused notion of the metalinguistic concept word and that they cannot focus on single word boundaries when words occur in normal syntactic/semantic frames. We challenge these assumptions and present a new technique which engages normal syntactic-semantic processing but which, once it is interrupted on-line, introduces a metalinguistic component. In three experiments, children listened to a story in which the narrator paused on open or closed class words and then asked children to repeat “the last word” or “the last thing” that she had said each time she stopped. The results show that children as young as 412−5 years treat both open and closed categories as words and clearly differentiate word and thing. We conclude by suggesting that the new technique may be useful for enhancing early reading readiness and for reassessing the relationship between literacy and metalinguistic awareness.