The Literacy Factor in Syntactic Judgement and Comprehension in Children

Abstract

Metalinguistic awareness has been defined as the ability of the child to reflect upon and manipulate the structural features of spoken language, treating language
as an object of thought as opposed to simply using the language system to produce and comprehend sentences (Tunmer, Pratt and Herriman, 1984). Though
there is agreement amongst researchers as to the meaning of metalinguistics there is a considerable amount of debate as to how and when metalinguistic
awareness actually arises