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ABSTRACT
The contribution of phonological memory to syntactic abilities has been demonstrated in various populations, but its relationship to metasyntactic abilities, defined as the ability to control syntactic aspects of language, remains largely unexplored. This study therefore aims to examine the contribution of phonological memory in the completion of two metasyntactic tasks: an ungrammatical sentence repetition and an error replication task. Eighty-three bilingual children (Mage = 10.5) completed the two metasyntactic tasks as well as tasks meant to control for lexical knowledge and syntactic abilities. A nonword repetition task measured phonological memory. Contrary to theoretical arguments which suggest that completion of both these tasks demonstrates the effect of phonological memory on metasyntactic abilities, the results show that phonological memory contributes significantly to metasyntactic abilities, only when measured by the repetition of ungrammatical sentences. Results suggest that different metasyntactic tasks rely differently on underlying linguistic and cognitive abilities.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also wish to express our gratitude to Karina Da Silva Da Rocha, the research assistant who assisted us in the various phases of this project. Finally, we express our sincere appreciation to the participants who took part in the study. This work was supported by a doctoral fellowship awarded to the first author by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture; and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under Grant 410-2008-1848 awarded to the second author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Syntactic awareness, as used by Cain (Citation2007), and metasyntactic abilities, as used in this study, are equivalent as they are both defined the same way as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structure of language.
2. Coding at the syllable level, allowing for some transformations to occur (for example, the substitution of [g] for [d], an error often observed in young French speakers), limits the possibilities that an error in either discrimination or production of phonemes would be wrongly attributed to difficulties related to phonological storage (see Fortier, Simard, & French, Citation2012, for more details). As mentioned by Edwards, Beckman, and Munson (Citation2004), coarse-grained measures, such as global nonword repetition performance, do not allow for differentiation between normal developmental errors or errors linked to phoneme perception of production in an experimental task and those related to phonological storage targeted by the use of nonword repetition tasks.
3. According to Tabachnick and Fidell (Citation2007), multicollinearity issues can occur when correlation coefficients are superior to r = 0.7.
4. Cohen and Cohen (Citation1983, p. 111) use the following formula to compare standardised ß's:z = ßi1 − ßi2
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Véronique Fortier
Véronique Fortier is professor in second language education at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research focuses on the measurement of metalinguistic abilities as well as on metalinguistic reflection in second language learning and teaching.
Daphnée Simard
Daphnée Simard is full professor of second language acquisition at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research interests are twofold. First, she investigates the relationship between metalinguistic, second language acquisition and individual variables such as attentional capacity. Second, she examines the role of attention in second language acquisition.