Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek–Italian bilingual children (8–11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using acceptability-rating tasks in which they had to judge and explain grammatical errors. The tasks were in monolingual and bilingual modes in order to show how far metalinguistic awareness in Italian benefited from the activation of Greek. The participants exhibited better metalinguistic awareness abilities in Italian in the bilingual acceptability-rating task in which Greek was activated. The benefits of the bilingual mode were visible in the judgment and explanation of errors and were modulated by syntactic processing abilities in Italian, length of exposure to Italian, type of structure, and age. The results show that metalinguistic awareness can be shared across languages. We discuss the pedagogical implications of our findings.

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双语激活下提升双语元语言意识：对双语教育的一些启示

大多数关于双语儿童元语言意识的研究都是使用单语任务来评估元语言意识。这可能无法反映双语者的语言在创建元语言表示时如何动态地相互作用。我们使用可接受性评级任务测试了 33 名希腊-意大利双语儿童（8-11 岁）的元语言意识，其中他们必须判断和解释语法错误。这些任务采用单语和双语模式，以显示意大利语的元语言意识在多大程度上受益于希腊语的激活。在激活希腊语的双语可接受性评级任务中，参与者表现出了更好的意大利语元语言意识能力。双语模式的好处在错误的判断和解释中是显而易见的，并且受到意大利语句法处理能力、接触意大利语的时间长短、结构类型和年龄的调节。结果表明，元语言意识可以跨语言共享。我们讨论我们的研究结果的教学意义。